Chris Degroot

Background

About Chris Degroot

I am an expert in numerical modelling and scientific software development. I like to apply my skills to help enable healthy and sustainable urban communities by investigating the interactions between water, energy, public health, and the carbon cycle. There are multiple complex interactions between these different factors that can be elucidated using mathematical models. I am keenly interested in water/wastewater treatment, collection systems, wastewater-based epidemiology, and carbon capture technologies. I am currently the CEO of Maple Key Labs, an innovative consulting company that specializes in computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations. Our goal is to help our clients make better design decisions and improve the performance of their products or processes. I also hold an appointment as Assistant Professor Western University (Canada) where I conduct research in the topics outlined above and teach courses in engineering design, thermodynamics, and fluid mechanics. I am also licensed as a Professional Engineer in the Province of Ontario. Prior to joining Western, I worked as a research scientist at Trojan Technologies, a world-leader in water treatment technologies. At Trojan, I used both numerical and experimental methods to model and optimize water treatment processes, particularly in the area of wastewater filtration. Prior to my work at Trojan, I worked on the CFD numerics team at ANSYS Inc. through a partnership with the University of Waterloo where I completed a postdoctoral fellowship. In this role, I worked mainly on the development of porous media models in ANSYS CFX and research and development on automatic differentiation for computing sensitivity derivatives in a general-purpose CFD code.