About

Brendan Keith

I am the Morton E. Gurtin Assistant Professor of Applied Mathematics in the Division of Applied Mathematics at Brown University. I work on numerical methods for partial differential equations (PDEs), scientific machine learning, and PDE-constrained optimization.

Research Highlight: See this press release about my work on machine learning and black holes!

Short Bio: Before coming to Brown, I was a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Applied Scientific Computing at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Before that, I was a postdoc at the Institute for Computational and Experimental Research in Mathematics. Before that, I was a postdoc at the Chair of Numerical Analysis at the Technical University of Munich, where I was supervised by Barbara Wohlmuth. Before that, I was a Ph.D. student at the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering & Sciences, where I was supervised by Leszek Demkowicz.

In The News!

I was selected as one of Popular Science’s “Brilliant 10” early career researchers of 2023

Current Research Funding

A.P. Sloan Research Fellowship in Mathematics  2025–2026  

DOE SC Early Career Research Program  2023–2028   REASON-3D: Randomized, Entropic, Adaptive, and Scalable Optimization for Non-Intrusive Data-Driven Design

NSF Computational and Data-Enabled Science and Engineering  2024–2027   Data-Driven Discovery of Neural ODE Dynamics, Astrophysical Models, and Orbits (Neural ODE DynAMO)

Other notes:

  • I’m an active MFEM developer. Check out our (growing) list of examples codes and miniapps here.
  • This website has been tidied up a little bit. If you are interested in my old finite element work (2015-2020), short summaries can be found here.