Leticia Mattos Da Silva

Contact
leticiam[at]mit[dot]edu

About me

I’m a Ph.D. student at MIT, where I work under the supervision of Justin Solomon. My research seeks to empower people with reliable and effective ways to solve geometry processing problems.

I am the recipient of two MathWorks Fellowships, a Google Fellowship and a MIT Distinguished Fellowship. Before coming to MIT, I graduated cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics at the University of California, Los Angeles.

In my spare time, I enjoy watching telenovelas (what am I watching now?) and pretending to be a great chef in my home kitchen.

Research Interests

I'm interested in understanding problems in geometry processing through the lens of partial differential equations (PDE). My goal is to make PDE-based methods robust and flexible enough that users can apply them with confidence and reliability, without being constrained by technical barriers. By bridging mathematical theory and the goal of usability, I aim to open new avenues for animation, design, and simulation, where advanced PDE techniques become natural extensions of a user’s creative process.

Publications

2025

Variational Elastodynamic Simulation

Leticia Mattos Da Silva, Silvia Sellán, Natalia Pacheco‐Tallaj, Justin Solomon
ACM SIGGRAPH 2025
Project Page Paper Code is coming soon!

Mirror Bridges Between Probability Measures

Leticia Mattos Da Silva, Silvia Sellán, Francisco Vargas, Justin Solomon
Under Peer Review
Project Page Paper

2024

A Framework for Solving Parabolic Partial Differential Equations on Discrete Domains

Leticia Mattos Da Silva, Oded Stein, Justin Solomon
ACM Transactions on Graphics (presented at SIGGRAPH 2024)
Project Page Paper

2022

Breaking Good: Fracture Modes for Realtime Destruction

Silvia Sellán, Jack Luong, Leticia Mattos Da Silva, Aravind Ramakrishnan, Yuchuan Yang, Alec Jacobson
ACM Transactions on Graphics
Project Page Paper Code

UROP Information

Ph.D. students like me typically are the day‐to‐day mentors for UROPs in our lab. If you are a student interested in doing a UROP with me, please read this page for more information before emailing me.

Availability

Fall 2025: Not available.

Spring 2026: Contact me via email (before Dec. 2025).

Potential UROP Project

I'm our lab's "local expert on nonlinear PDE and other problems in the dynamical universe." We can jointly figure out a research direction in this area, but here's an example of a UROP project we could work on together — it is quite open‐ended!

Overview. The Schrödinger Bridge Problem (SBP) seeks to steer an initial probability distribution of a linear stochastic system to a terminal distribution using minimal energy. In this project, we will explore a generalization of the SBP with nonlinear prior dynamics. The goal is to design a numerical solver for a pair of PDE associated with this generalization of the problem. We will then investigate using this solver in a pipeline to recover the optimal variables for the SBP. Here is a good reference to start with, if you are interested in pursuing a project in this direction.

Prerequisites. There are no requirements beyond understanding of linear algebra, but 6.8410 can be helpful.