SDSU professor applies math to ketchup, cartoons, computers and climate modeling

While mathematics is essential to many scientific disciplines, from physics to biology, the subject is notorious for inducing anxiety among students worldwide. Assistant professor Valeria Barra never shared this angst over arithmetic.

With a love for math that extends back as far as she can remember, Barra has used her computational skills to examine the behaviors of unusual liquids, create Pixar animations, fuel the world’s fastest supercomputers and even monitor climate change with NASA. In her current role as an educator at San Diego State University, she hopes to break down barriers to math, particularly for women in the field.

From ketchup to cartoons

As a girl growing up in the picturesque medieval town of Siena, Italy, Barra had many academic interests but eventually chose to pursue mathematics.

“I never regretted that decision,” she said.

While also dancing hip hop professionally, Barra completed her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in her home country before receiving a full scholarship for what was supposed to be a one year exchange program at Newark’s New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT). 

“It was eye-opening because I saw how the academic environment in the United States is a lot more rich of opportunities like networking and professional development for students,” she said. 

Rather than return to Italy, Barra stayed at NJIT to complete her PhD in applied math. Her research focused on the computational fluid dynamics of non-Newtonian fluids — in other words, creating mathematical and numerical models that explain the movements of things like ketchup, toothpaste or slime, which aren’t quite solid but don’t flow as easily as liquids like water do.

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While completing her PhD, Barra also worked as a research intern for Pixar Animation Studios, where she developed software libraries used by animators to bring cartoons to life. Her personal story was even made into a cartoon called “Still in the Family” which was added as bonus content on the Cars 3 DVD.

Climate solutions

After earning her PhD, Barra worked in high-performance computing at the University of Colorado Boulder. She developed open-source libraries that allowed researchers to more efficiently conduct calculations using some of Earth’s fastest supercomputers.

“From my PhD research that was in a very niche area, it evolved into something that has much broader impact, like high-performance computing, which is very relevant nowadays and much needed in the STEM community,” she said.

A numerical simulation that models the flow of air around Earth, which Barra created for the CliMA project (Courtesy Valeria Barra)

Barra went on to work as a research software engineer under Caltech’s Climate Modeling Alliance (CliMA) in collaboration with MIT and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. There, she joined a team of software engineers, climate scientists, atmospheric scientists and land hydrologists and biologists to develop models that inform policymakers’ responses to our quickly changing climate.

“Every year when policymakers unite, they make decisions based on predictions provided by current climate models,” she said. “However, some of these models have been around for decades now.”

Barra’s group was tasked with building an updated model from scratch that offers more reliable and accurate predictions of drought, heat waves and extreme rainfall. She was responsible for developing the core of the system: the mathematical elements behind the software that powers the model.

"True calling"

After wearing many hats during her early career, Barra arrived at SDSU two years ago with a new purpose.

“I really felt like my true calling was staying in academia,” she said. “I love to talk about math and about my experience, and if I can inspire even just one student, especially women, to explore the beauty of math and all of its applications, I feel like that would be my greatest accomplishment.”

Barra’s lab focuses on stabilization methods, which make complex equations easier for computers to solve. This is particularly important for continuous problems which do not have finite endings, similar to irrational numbers like pi whose digits go on forever.

“Our computers do not have infinite memory or storage. They can digest only a limited number of points,” Barra said. “So we need to translate that continuous information into something that our computer can digest.”

In the process, key information sometimes gets lost in translation, leaving equations unstable and causing computer programs to crash. Barra says using stabilization methods not only enables large quantities of data to be processed by sophisticated computers, but saves money and environmental resources required to run the simulations.

“I really care about environmental footprints of computational endeavors,” Barra said. “So I'm interested in stabilization methods so that your program remains stable even for a very, very long time.”

Barra’s academic experience was not an easy one. She did not have many role models, connections or mentors and, seeing how few women were in the field, she doubted whether she was making the correct career decision.

But as she passed exams and met requirements, Barra gained confidence and found her passion. She now hopes to help make the path forward in STEM easier for generations to come.

“A lot of people are truly traumatized by math and this is so unfortunate,” she said. “When people understand how to derive formulas and why those formulas work, they can appreciate the beauty of math and its large applicability.”

Barra teaches Computational Methods for Scientists (COMP 526) in the fall and Scientific Computing (COMP 605) in the spring, in addition to conducting research under the Computational Science Research Center on campus.