Facundo Sapienza

Affiliations. Department of Geophysics, Stanford University.

prof_pic.jpg

359 Mitchell Building

Stanford University

CA 94305, USA

I am an Argentinian postdoctoral researcher in the Stanford Icy Physics Lab working with Prof. Ching-Yao Lai. My research lies in the intersection of novel data science methods and physics, with emphasis in glacier modelling and scientific software development. Before joining Stanford, I completed my PhD at UC Berkeley under the supervision of Prof. Fernando Pérez (UC Berkeley, Project Jupyter) and Prof. Jonathan Taylor (Stanford).

Large part of my work is motivated by the use of differential equations as regression mechanisms to model complex geophysical systems. By leveraging in modern differential programming tools, it is possible to train machine learning models where the modelled response is given by the numerical solutions of physical constrained differential equations. This allows to combine both data and physics-driven approaches. I focus in the applications of this tools for mountain glacier modelling, where I work in funcional inversion problems aiming to discover empirical laws governing the flow of ice. With the advent of rich datasets with larger spatial and temporal coverage, it is becoming possible to model glaciers at global scale.

I also work in data-driven approaches for the modelling of apparent polar wander paths, where the objective in to learn about the past motion of plate tectonics by relying in paleomagnetic data. This involves learning patterns from scarse and noise data supported in the sphere.

I am enthusiastic about open science and reproducibility research, and the ways that data science can help to democratize science. It is my belief that physics and earth science will benefit from the incorporation of data driven-approaces.

Conceptual diagram of my topics of research and interest.

keyworkds: physics-informed ML, differential programming, glaciology, paleomagnetism, scientific computing, open-source.

News

Sep 2, 2024 I just started my postdoc at the Stanford Icy Physics Lab working with Prof. Ching-Yao Lai :snowflake:
Jun 17, 2024 New preprint available! Differentiable Programming for Differential Equations: A Review :bell:
May 10, 2024 I just got my PhD from UC Berkeley (and on the same day as my 30th birthday!) :tada:
Nov 3, 2023 Sapienza et. al (2023) highlighted in Eos :earth_africa: :newspaper:
Oct 15, 2023 Check on the article about my reseach in the news La Nacion in Argentina (in Spanish) :newspaper:

Selected publications

  1. ODINN.jpg
    Differentiable Programming for Differential Equations: A Review
    Facundo Sapienza, Jordi Bolibar, Frank Schäfer, and 8 more authors
    arXiv preprint arXiv:2406.09699, 2024
  2. paleomag.png
    Quantitative Analysis of Paleomagnetic Sampling Strategies
    F. Sapienza, L. C. Gallo, Y. Zhang, and 3 more authors
    Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth, 2023
  3. ODINN.jpg
    Universal Differential Equations for glacier ice flow modelling
    J. Bolibar, F. Sapienza, F. Maussion, and 3 more authors
    Geoscientific Model Development, 2023
  4. quantum-thermodynamics.jpg
    Correlations as a resource in quantum thermodynamics
    Facundo Sapienza, Federico Cerisola, and Augusto J Roncaglia
    Nature communications, 2019