Students Series

Marie-Jean Thoraval
Drop Impact

Marie-Jean Thoraval is from an area in the French Alps of pristine beauty and great isolation. Though Marie-jean enjoyed the peacefulness of his hometown, he decided early on that he also needed to see the world. His travels have taken him to Japan, China, Singapore, and now Saudi Arabia.

Marie-Jean studied at Ecole Polytechnique and later at Supaéro (ISAE), specializing in Fluid Dynamics. In 2007, he went to the National University of Singapore to work with Dr. Sigurdur Thoroddsen on high-speed imaging of drops and bubbles.

When Professor Thoroddsen took a position at a brand new university called KAUST, Marie-Jean jumped at the opportunity to continue working with his advisor in Saudi Arabia.

Marie-Jean studies the impact of drops falling into a liquid pool, with a high-speed (one million frames per second) camera. He is fascinated by the complexity and visual beauty of this seemingly simple phenomenon. His work has impact on a number of applied fields, such as the two-phase flow of oil and gas and the functioning of inkjet printers.

Marie-Jean, who is an avid mountaineer and rock climber, spends his free time learning to windsurf in the Red Sea.

Besides his native French, Marie-Jean also speaks English and Mandarin Chinese. He would like to learn Arabic next.

He says "I enjoy walking around campus and learning about the diversity of Arabic culture."

Gouda Chen
Data Mining

Gouda Chen is from China where he studied computer science at Sun Yat Sen University. Upon graduation, Gouda had a job offer at China Mobile and was set to join the company when he heard about KAUST. When he looked at the KAUST website, he was amazed by the state-of-the-art labs, striking architecture, and supercomputing facilities. Gouda was also excited that famous faculty like mathematician Dr. David Keyes were going to KAUST. Gouda decided to take a chance and applied to KAUST.

He was thrilled to be accepted and was also pleasantly surprised to learn that 50 other students from China were also going to study at KAUST.

Gouda works with Dr. Panos Kalnis on data management and data mining. With the development of the Internet, social networking sites, and research in genetics, data sets are becoming larger and larger. The purpose of data management is to find efficient methods to help people make full use of data, whether in scientific fields or in day-to-day life.

Gouda and three of his classmates were finalists at the ACM SIGMOD programming competition and were invited to present their implementation in the US. He also spent additional time in the US completing an internship at IBM in New York. He enjoyed working with an IBM team to improve the performance of a Message Passing Interface, an application that allows computers to communicate with one another and is used in computer clusters and supercomputers.

He found the research environment at IBM to be similar to the environment at KAUST: very focused and collaborative. Gouda describes his experience, of making friends from all corners of the world and meeting renowned speakers at events like the Winter Enrichment Program, in one word: "Unbelievable!"