Presenter

Neil Ashton is a Distinguished Engineer at NVIDIA focused on AI physics and agentic AI for computational engineering. A Fellow of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, he works across accelerated simulation, scientific machine learning, and physical AI, helping bring advanced AI methods into practical aerospace, automotive, and industrial workflows. He pioneered the first open datasets for complete aircraft (HiLiftAeroML) and road-vehicle configurations (DrivAerML) and also leads major international workshops, including AutoCFD and HLPW-6, bringing together academia, industry, and government labs to advance validation, reproducibility, and trustworthy AI-enabled simulation. His current work explores cutting-edge methods in AI agents, physics foundation models, surrogate modeling, and accelerated digital twins, with a focus on systems that can reason about, simulate, and optimize complex physical designs. Prior to NVIDIA, he held positions at AWS, NASA, Formula 1, and the University of Oxford.