Gropp Named AAAS Fellow

11/27/2018

The distinction recognizes contributions to scalable algorithms and software for high performance computing.

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Illinois Computer Science Professor William D. Gropp has been named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

As part of the Information, Computing and Communication section, Gropp, who is Director and Chief Scientist of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and the Thomas M. Siebel Chair in the Department of Computer Science at Illinois, was elected as an AAAS Fellow for his distinguished contributions to scalable algorithms and software for high performance computing.

William Gropp
William Gropp
Election as an AAAS Fellow is an honor bestowed upon AAAS members by their peers. This year, 416 members have been awarded this honor by AAAS because of their scientifically or socially distinguished efforts to advance science or its applications. New Fellows will be presented with an official certificate and a gold and blue (representing science and engineering, respectively) rosette pin at the AAAS Fellows Forum during the 2019 AAAS Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C. this February and will be announced in the "AAAS News & Notes" section of the journal Science on November 29, 2018.

Throughout his nearly 40-year career, Gropp has explored parallel computing, software for scientific computing, numerical methods for partial differential equations, and the development of efficient and scalable parallel algorithms for the solution of linear and nonlinear equations. He has played a major role in the development of the MPI message-passing standard and was one of the designers of the PETSc parallel numerical library. Gropp is also recognized as a fellow of the ACM, IEEE, SIAM, and an elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering.

“The AAAS is the premier society representing all of science, and it is a leader in communicating science to the public. I’m proud to be a member and I am honored by this recognition,” said Gropp.

Other 2018 Fellows from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign include Dr. Narayana Aluru of the Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering in the Engineering section, for outstanding contributions to computational, physical, and engineering aspects of nanofluidics and micro/nanoelectromechanical systems including the development of novel multiphysics and multiscale methods; Dr. Andrew D.B. Leakey of the Department of Crop Sciences in the Agriculture, Food and Renewable Resources section, for distinguished contributions to plant science, particularly for advancing integrative understanding of crop carbon and water relations in the context of global environmental change; and Dr. Ray Ming of the School of Integrative Biology, also in the Agriculture, Food and Renewable Resources section, for distinguished contribution to the field of sex chromosome evolution, particularly using genomic technologies to study early stages of sex chromosomes relevant to crop improvement.

The tradition of AAAS Fellows began in 1874. Currently, members can be considered for the rank of Fellow if nominated by the steering groups of the Association’s 24 sections, or by any three Fellows who are current AAAS members (so long as two of the three sponsors are not affiliated with the nominee’s institution), or by the AAAS chief executive officer. Fellows must have been continuous members of AAAS for four years by the end of the calendar year in which they are elected. AAAS Fellow’s lifetime honor comes with an expectation that recipients maintain the highest standards of professional ethics and scientific integrity.

Each steering group reviews the nominations of individuals within its respective section and a final list is forwarded to the AAAS Council, which votes on the aggregate list. The Council is the policymaking body of the Association, chaired by the AAAS president, and consisting of the members of the board of directors, the retiring section chairs, delegates from each electorate and each regional division, and two delegates from the National Association of Academies of Science.
 



ABOUT AAAS
The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is the world’s largest general scientific society and publisher of the journal Science (www.sciencemag.org) as well as Science Translational Medicine, Science Signaling, a digital, open-access journal, Science Advances, Science Immunology, and Science Robotics. AAAS was founded in 1848 and includes nearly 250 affiliated societies and academies of science, serving 10 million individuals. Science has the largest paid circulation of any peer-reviewed general science journal in the world. The non-profit AAAS is open to all and fulfills its mission to “advance science and serve society” through initiatives in science policy, international programs, science education, public engagement, and more. For the latest research news, log onto EurekAlert! (www.eurekalert.org), the premier science-news Web site, a service of AAAS.


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This story was published November 27, 2018.