Meet Our Team
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David Mebane is Founder and Technical Lead at Harappa Modeling. David is an Associate Professor in Mechanical, Materials and Aerospace Engineering, and Adjunct Professor in Chemical and Biomedical Engineering at WVU. He has been a Visiting Research Scientist at NASA Ames Research Center, an ORISE Faculty Fellow with the National Energy Technology Laboratory, and a Visiting Professor at the University of Rome Tor Vergata. He has worked in many domains, including high temperature electrochemistry, lithium batteries, carbon capture, chemical looping, thermal systems, catalysis, and environmental systems. Dave applies sharp scientific intuition and unique, state-of-the-art computational methods to difficult technical problems.
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Michael Fouts is a former Ph.D. student in the Energy Systems and Materials Simulation Group at West Virginia University. His Ph.D. work focused on developing methods and applications for physics-informed machine learning, in particular embedded Gaussian processes. Michael is a specialist in optimization, control and model-based Bayesian calibration.
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Alejandro Mejia is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Universidad de Antioquia, with M.Sc. (2017) in Aerospace Engineering and Ph.D. (2024) in Materials Science and Engineering, specializing in data-driven model building, with emphasis on computational modeling of electrochemical systems. His research focuses on developing models for ceria-based electrolysis cells using the MOOSE finite element analysis framework, implementing Bayesian and Monte Carlo methods for parameter estimation, and advancing numerical simulations and machine learning techniques in materials science. He has extensive experience in high-performance computing, C++, Python, and MATLAB, with applications in static and dynamic systems, solid-state ionics, and electrocatalysis.
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Derek Slack specializes in computational workflows for parameter estimation in physics-informed machine learning and implementation of those workflows in MATLAB and Python. Specialties include Bayesian calibration, parameter estimation, embedded GPs and code acceleration and parallelization. He is a contributor to key repositories used in physics-informed machine learning. He has a Master of Science in Aerospace Engineering from WVU(2026).
Conscious Science
The Indus River Valley Civilization flourished in South Asia, most of it in the region of what is now Pakistan, in the third and second millenia BC. Remarkably, although it was likely the largest of the known Bronze Age civilizations, it was unknown until its discovery by modern archaeologists in the 1920s. Also unlike other Bronze Age civilizations such as those in Egypt and Mesopotamia, there is a distinct lack of palaces, ornate burials and other features indicating an economically stratified society.
Killing the Priest-King: Addressing Egalitarianism in the Indus Civilization
Nonetheless, inhabitants of this civilization's many cities and smaller towns (Harappa was one of the largest population centers) enjoyed the fruits of advanced technologies such as large buildings, water and sewer systems, and other quality wares. This challenges the notion, first developing among nineteenth-century archaeologists studying the highly stratified Bronze Age societies of the West, that steep hierarchy is a prerequisite for technological development and advanced civilization. Harappa Modeling works in advanced technology, in an embodied way. We don't work in weapons technology or on anything that is making our environment less clean. We operate as a collective : a group of collaborators who share knowledge of and interest in physics-informed machine learning. We have different levels of experience, but we nevertheless work together on projects as colleagues.