Who I Am

My name’s Pat Marty and I develop software tools in the field of acoustics.

The software tools I develop are used to model how sound waves move through different materials. Using this information, I can construct images of the internal structures of a particular medium.

Most of my work and research interests focus around:

Numerical wave physics

Medical ultrasound imaging

Non-destructive testing

Finite-element modeling

High-performance computing

For a collection of a few of my past projects, see here.

R&D Engineer at Mondaic

I’m currently an R&D engineer at the ETH Spin-off Mondaic AG in Zurich, Switzerland, where I work in a team developing the spectral-element solver called Salvus. This software is extremely efficient for solving wave propagation problems at scale and it is being used in fields ranging from planetary seismology to medical ultrasound.

To give an idea for the types of simulations that I work on at Mondaic, here is an animation I created that visualizes how sound waves originating from corrosion pitting propagate in a fluid-filled storage tank:

I created this animation using a combination of:

• Salvus: Mondaic’s spectral-element code for modeling the propagation of sound waves.
• Coreform Cubit: Creating the fully unstructured and conforming hexahedral mesh used for the wave simulation.
• Blender: Fly-by portion of the animation showing the geometry of the storage tank.
• Paraview: Visualizing the hexahedral mesh and the volumetric wavefield.

Education

I previously completed my PhD (Dr. sc. ETH Zurich) in the area of wave physics at ETH Zürich. My thesis titled Transcranial Ultrasound Modeling and Inversion developed techniques for modeling the propagation of ultrasound through the human skull, with the primary applications being for imaging the human brain using ultrasound and applying therapeutic focused ultrasound.

Since the human skull significantly distorts the ultrasound waves as they pass through bone (almost acting like a blurring lens), I adapted methods that were developed in seismic imaging and applied them to medical ultrasound.

Some of the topics that I have studied in my research include:

• Using high-order finite-element methods for modeling ultrasound propagation.
• Generating hexahedral finite-element meshes of complex geometries.
• Performing multiphysics (fluid-solid) ultrasound simulations.
• Developing adjoint-based shape optimization approaches.
• Use the Piz Daint and Alps high-performance computing systems to solve these problems at scale.

Prior to pursuing my PhD at ETH Zurich, I completed the IDEA League Joint Master’s in Applied Geophysics where I studied at TU Delft (the Netherlands), ETH Zurich (Switzerland), and RWTH Aachen (Germany). This followed the completion of my Bachelor of Applied Science at Queen’s University (Canada) where I studied geological engineering.

A list of my publications can be seen here.

My Other Passions

When I’m not solving the wave equation, I enjoy:

• Hiking and trail running in the Swiss Alps. I document many of my tours on my other website The Local Ibex.
• Listening to music, going to concerts, and playing guitar. I especially enjoy genres such as progressive metal, djent, and post-rock.
• The art of landscape photography, which is closely related to the first point above.