Melina Merkel studied computational engineering at Technische Universität Darmstadt and received her M.Sc. degree in 2019. She worked on her PhD in the Computational Electromagnetics (CEM) Group at the Institute for Accelerator Science and Electromagnetic Fields of the TU Darmstadt under the supervision of Prof. Sebastian Schöps and defended her thesis in November 2023. Currently, she is working at CEM as a researcher in the Collaborative Research Centre TRR361/F90 CREATOR.
She works on the modeling, multiphysical simulation and shape optimization of electrical machines based on Isogeometric Analysis (IGA) in three dimensions. Her research focuses on efficient methods for the implementation of rotation of machines in IGA, using domain decomposition and coupling methods for nonconforming discretizations, e.g., mortaring. Furthermore, she investigates graph-based methods for the elimination of the discrete kernel of the system matrix in the isogeometric context.