Rate My Professor Fabien Montiel

Dr. Fabien Montiel is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Otago. An applied mathematician with interests across physical and environmental sciences, he graduated with a Master of Science in Engineering (Diplôme d'Ingénieur) from École Centrale de Nantes in France, specializing in ocean engineering. He arrived in New Zealand in 2008 for a six-month internship in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Auckland. In 2009, Montiel began his PhD at the University of Otago's Department of Mathematics and Statistics, completing it in 2012 with the thesis "Numerical and Experimental Analysis of Water Wave Scattering by Floating Elastic Plates." He stayed on as a postdoctoral researcher for four years, was appointed Lecturer in 2017, and promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2020. He serves as Director of Studies for 400-level and Honours Mathematics, coordinating courses such as MATH 120 (Mathematics for Scientists), COMO 204 (Differential Equations), and MATH 4PD (Numerical methods for PDEs).

Montiel's research focuses on modelling wave propagation in complex media, including applied mathematics, physical oceanography, acoustics, and sea ice physics. His work covers semi-analytical methods for wave scattering, ocean wave-sea ice interactions in polar regions, buoyant particle transport, wave energy harvesting, sea ice floe breakup, and locally resonant acoustic structures. Funded projects include the Marsden Fund "How vulnerable are Antarctica's coasts to colonisation?" (2021–2024), Antarctic Science Platform "Seasonal and Interdecadal variability of sea ice in the Ross Sea" (2019–2025), Marsden Fast Start "Breaking the ice" (2019–2022), Deep South National Science Challenge (2015–2020), and Office of Naval Research (2013–2017). He supervises PhD students on wave-induced sea ice breakup and rainbow trapping in water waves, and MSc on Ross Sea ocean waves. Key publications are "Evaluation of ice dissipation parameterizations in spectral ocean wave model WAVEWATCH III" (Montiel et al., Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans, 2025), "Analysis of the Antarctic marginal ice zone" (Day et al., 2024), "Emerging long-term trends in Antarctic polynyas" (Duffy et al., PNAS, 2024), "Rainbow reflection and broadband energy absorption of water waves" (Wilks et al., Wave Motion, 2022), and "Physical Drivers of Ocean Wave Attenuation in the Southern Ocean Marginal Ice Zone" (Montiel, 2022). With over 1,500 Google Scholar citations, his contributions advance polar oceanography and applied mathematics.