University of Virginia brains and brawn have been on full display at the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris.
Alumni of the UVA School Engineering and Applied Science, in collaboration with other scientists at the University, have found a way to propel the team to faster performances through the use of “digital twins,” which are virtual representations of the swimmers used for data analysis. They recently wrote about their methodical approach in Scientific American.
Key among the researchers has been Jerry Lu, a 2022 systems and information engineering graduate of the UVA School of Engineering and a current graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who helps lead the team's analytics.
Now, the team has begun converting what they’ve learned into medals.
Over the weekend, the U.S. team of UVA’s Kate Douglass and Gretchen Walsh, along with Torri Huske and Simone Manuel, won silver in the women’s swimming 4x100m freestyle relay. Walsh also won silver in the 100-meter butterfly.
Lu co-authored the Sci-Am paper with Douglass, who originally majored in computer science at the Engineering School before changing her major to data science, and University STEM adviser Ken Ono, a renowned mathematician.
Lu has divided his time between Charlottesville and Boston to help with the project.
“We’re not here to make them our coding monkeys,” Lu said in a recent article for UVA Today. “Ken and I are here to make it fun for them. They’re elite swimmers. It’s up to them to figure out how to use the box of tools to solve problems."
Other authors on the paper include Augustus Lamb, who earned his undergraduate degree in computer science from UVA's School of Engineering in 2023, and William Tenpas, a mechanical engineer. Lamb holds a master’s degree from UVA's School of Data Science, where Tenpas is currently pursuing his master’s.
The data was originally presented in Mathematical Intelligencer.
The USA women’s swim team is led by UVA swim coach Todd DeSorbo.