Wesley Reinhart is an assistant professor and a 2020 Institute for Computational and Data Sciences Faculty Fellow. Prior to joining Penn State, he worked as a research scientist at Siemens Corporate Technology. There, his research initiatives focused on computational geometry, knowledge representation, and exploiting the structure-function relationship in manufacturing contexts.
Reinhart’s research is interdisciplinary by nature and uses a data-driven approach to facilitate the design, manufacture, and maintenance of advanced materials, whose sought-after functions and properties will be derived from their yet-unknown internal structure. This relationship between structure and function is challenging to understand and even harder to predict because it is nonlinear, high dimensional, and results from physical phenomena at many scales. Traditional materials design has relied on human intuition to interpret patterns in known structure-function pairs and infer new materials with similar and hopefully improved properties, Reinhart’s group aims to use a combination of high-performance physics simulation and data science approaches to arrive at efficient representations of materials that will enable true inverse design of micro-structure. Read more