Siamak Akbarzadeh successfully defended his thesis on using Automatic Differentiation software tools to obtain adjoint variants of the incompressible SIMPLE scheme. Adjoint methods are essential for numerical optimisation of many-parameter systems with expensive models, such as CFD. Siamak's work is a step forward in deriving robust adjoints for the widely used SIMPLE discretisation of incompressible flow.
Siamaks work was funded by the EC via the About Flow project
http://aboutflow.sems.qmul.ac.uk/