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Article | Mathematics and Computer Science

McInnes recognized as SIAM Fellow

Lois Curfman McInnes has been named Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM).

The fellowship program awards those who have made outstanding contributions in research, education or industrial activities and have been members of SIAM for 7 of the past 10 years.

McInnes is a senior computational scientist in Argonne’s Mathematics and Computer Science (MCS) Division. She was honored by SIAM for her contributions to scalable numerical algorithms and software libraries for solving large-scale scientific and engineering problems.”

One of her most outstanding accomplishments is her work on the PETSc software library, for which McInnes has developed scalable nonlinear solvers as well as adaptive and composite linear algorithms.  In recognition of this work she won the 2015 SIAM/ACM Prize in Computational Science and Engineering and received an R&D 100 Award in 2009 (with collaborators); she also won an E. O. Lawrence Award in 2011 (joint with Barry Smith) for outstanding contributions in research and development supporting DOE and its missions.  McInnes also was winner of an Argonne National Laboratory Distinguished Performance Award in 2013 and a participant in Argonne’s Strategic Laboratory Leadership Program in 2012.

Lois is an exceptional researcher whose contributions include robust, efficient, scalable, and extensible tools that are the backbone of numerous high-performance DOE simulation codes,” said Rob Ross, interim director of the MCS Division. Her work crosses traditional boundaries, often involving collaboration with scientists and engineers.  For example, while serving as Chair (2015-16) and Program Director (2013-14) of the SIAM Activity Group on Computational Science and Engineering (SIAG/CSE), she coordinated (with other SIAG/CSE officers) a new community report on Research and Education in Computational Science and Engineering.”

Currently, McInnes and her collaborators are developing scalable solvers designed to benefit a broad range of applications, including fusion, geodynamics, subsurface flow, and earthquake simulation.  She co-leads the multi-institutional IDEAS productivity project (https://​ideas​-pro​duc​tiv​i​ty​.org), which is working to improve software productivity, quality, and sustainability—key elements of overall scientific productivity.  She coordinates work on the Extreme-scale Scientific Software Development Kit (xSDK), which is improving interoperability of software packages developed by diverse groups, especially as needed by applications within the Exascale Computing Project (ECP).

McInnes and 27 other newly named Fellows will be recognized for their achievements during the SIAM Annual Meeting July 10-14, 2017, in Pittsburgh, PA. SIAM is an international community of more than 14,000 individual, academic, and corporate members. Through publications, conferences, and activity groups, the organization fosters the development of applied mathematical and computational methodologies essential in solving many real-world problems.