Who I Am

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

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

Exploring the world and meeting people from other cultures is important to me. I’ve been very fortunate to have studied in Canada, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Germany and I hold degrees from Queen’s University, TU Delft, ETH Zürich, and RWTH Aachen, respectively.

I have experience within both industry and academia in fields such as:

• Medical ultrasound imaging
• Finite-element meshing and spectral-element modelling
• Geophysical site characterization
• Tunnel engineering
• Building information modelling (BIM)

Researcher at ETH Zürich

I’m currently working on my PhD at ETH Zürich where I’m developing techniques for imaging the human brain using ultrasound. Since conventional ultrasound can’t image through hard materials such as bone, I’m adapting techniques developed in seismic imaging and applying 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.
• Hexahedral finite-element mesh generation of complex geometries.
• Performing multiphysics (fluid-solid) ultrasound simulations.
• Developing gradient-based shape optimization approaches.
• Use the Piz Daint and Alps high-performance computing (HPC) systems to solve these problems at scale.

A list of publications that I’ve contributed to throughout my PhD can be seen here.

Developer at Mondaic

Apart from my research in medical ultrasound, I’m also a part-time developer at the ETH Spin-off Mondaic AG, which develops the spectral-element solver Salvus. This software is used in fields ranging from global scale seismology to non-destructive testing.

To give an idea for the types of simulations that I work on at Mondaic, here is an animation I created to visualize 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.

My Other Passions

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

• Hiking in the Swiss Alps. I document many of my hikes 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.