Home > Memorial > > Bio

Memorial Nov 14, 1944 - Sep 16, 2011

The Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences (ICES) mourns the loss of Graham F. Carey, professor of aerospace engineering and engineering mechanics, director of the ICES Computational Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, and holder of the Richard B. Curran Chair in Engineering.

Dr. Carey died Friday, September 16 at the age of 66. A private memorial ceremony was held for family.

To honor his important work in the computational sciences, ICES has established a scholarship for participants in the ICES undergraduate certificate program. The Graham F. Carey Computational Science Scholarship will be awarded annually.

Dr. Carey was born in Australia Nov. 14, 1944. He earned his bachelor of science degree in applied mathematics with honors from the University of Queensland, Australia in 1966. The Boeing Company in Seattle recruited him in 1968 to help develop the Boeing 747 and the Lunar Rover. During that time he completed his master’s degree at the University of Washington. He left Boeing to pursue his Ph.D. in aeronautics and astronautics, which he completed in 1974.

For three years he worked as a research assistant professor at the University of Washington’s Aerospace Research Laboratory and Center for Quantitative Science. In 1977 he joined the faculty at The University of Texas at Austin where he served for 34 years until his death.

Dr. Carey’s research and teaching activities primarily dealt with techniques in computational mechanics, particularly finite element methods and supercomputing.

At his death he was continuing to conduct research in finite element analysis, methodology and software engineering, mathematical modeling, unstructured and adaptive mesh techniques, algorithms and applications on parallel supercomputers, error estimation and uncertainty assessment, computational fluid dynamics, and coupled transport processes.

Dr. Carey was a prolific writer who published more than 250 papers in refereed journals and authored or co-authored 10 books. He served on the editorial boards of eight scientific journals.

His research was further recognized when he was elected a fellow of the International Association of Computational Mechanics, named to the W. J. Murray Centennial Teaching Fellowship in 1986, received an Engineering Foundation Excellence Award and a high performance computing 'Gigaflop' award in 1989. As recently as April his work continued to win accolades when a paper he co-authored on porous media was named the outstanding paper of the year by the International Journal of Numerical Methods for Heat & Fluid Flow.

His teaching was honored with the Ex-Students' Association 1995 Texas Excellence Teaching Award in the College of Engineering.

Contributions to the Graham F. Carey Computational Science Scholarship fund may be made by clicking here: Make A Gift to ICES. Next, select 'Graham F. Carey Scholarship in Computational Science' from the second pull-down menu.