Unless otherwise noted, all seminars take place in ACE 6.304 from 3:30 – 5:00 PM.

Mon, Jul 27 Prof. Georgiy Stenchikov — King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Thuwal, Saudi Arabia ICES Seminar: “Long-term Climate Response to Short-term Volcanic Forcing”

• We are pleased to announce that Professor Omar Ghattas' paper entitled "A Newton-CG method for large-scale three-dimensional elastic full-waveform seismic inversion" was selected for the 2008 Highlights of the journal Inverse Problems.

"The articles in this collection were selected to showcase the diversity of the journal, some containing outstanding research and breakthroughs, some with especially clear exposition and beautiful presentation, and others that are instructive, with tools useful to many readers. To ensure that your work reaches the widest possible audience, these articles have been made freely available online and will remain free until the end of the year."

Selected articles can be found at: http://herald.iop.org/IPhighlights/m44/avh//link/2659.

Congratulations, Professor Ghattas.

• We are pleased to announce that Professor Thomas J. R. Hughes received an Honorary Doctorate from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway. The article may be found at:
http://www.universitetsavisa.no/ua_lesmer.php?kategori=nyheter&dokid=4a27a773d09294.42856644#

Congratulations Professor Hughes, on behalf of ICES.

• The Institute is pleased to announce the creation of an Undergraduate Certificate Program in Computational Science and Engineering.

• We are pleased to announce that, in addition to Professors Ivo Babuska, Thomas J. R. Hughes and J. Tinsley Oden, Professor Mary Wheeler was also selected as Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) for her outstanding contributions to the fields served by SIAM.

"The initial Fellows were selected from among those SIAM members for which certain previous recognition places them clearly among those intended to be recognized by this program. This included members of certain national academies and corporate and laboratory fellowship programs, recipients of certain SIAM or ICIAM prizes, recent editors-in-chief of SIAM journals, and former SIAM presidents."

Congratulations to Professor Wheeler.

• We are pleased to announce that Professor Leszek Demkowicz has received the Olgierd Cecil Zienkiewicz Medal from the Polish Association for Computational Mechanics for his outstanding merit in the development of computational mechanics.

The medal will be awarded at the 18th International Conference on Computer Methods in Mechanics (CMM 2009) in Poland.

Please join us in congratulating Professor Demkowicz.

• We are pleased to announce that Professor Leszek Demkowicz has been selected the recipient of the U.S. Association for Computational Mechanics/Computational and Applied Sciences Award for 2009. He was selected to receive this award "for pioneering work in both the theory and implementation of hp-Finite Element Methods, its application to numerous areas of computational mechanics, and in particular computational electromagnetics."

Professor Demkowicz will be presented with the award at the USACM Appreciation Dinner during the 10th U.S. National Congress on Computational Mechanics in July in Columbus, Ohio.

Congratulations to Professor Demkowicz on behalf of ICES.

• We are pleased to announce that Professor Thomas Hughes has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences. This is in recognition of his distinguished and continuing achievements in original research.

The National Academy of Sciences is a private organization of scientists and engineers dedicated to the furtherance of science and its use for the general welfare. It was established in 1863 by a congressional act of incorporation signed by Abraham Lincoln that calls on the Academy to act as an official adviser to the federal government, upon request, in any matter of science or technology.

Congratulations to Professor Hughes!

• We are pleased to announce that Professor William Press has been selected by President Obama to serve on the
President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST).

The article reads:
"PCAST is an advisory group of the nation’s leading scientists and engineers who will advise the President and Vice President and formulate policy in the many areas where understanding of science, technology, and innovation is key to strengthening our economy and forming policy that works for the American people.

President Barack Obama said, "This council represents leaders from many scientific disciplines who will bring a diversity of experience and views. I will charge PCAST with advising me about national strategies to nurture and sustain a culture of scientific innovation."

Congratulations to Professor Press on behalf of ICES.

• We are pleased to announce that the Special Issue of Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering has been dedicated to Professor J. Tinsley Oden on the occasion of his 70th birthday. The journal was published last week.

Part of the laudatio reads:

"Throughout his career, John Tinsley Oden has made seminal contributions in many areas of computational mechanics and scientific computation. Accordingly, in honor of his 70th birthday, this special issue of Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering features the latest developments in several areas of computational mechanics and scientific computation to which he has contributed. From applications in nanotechnology and bioengineering, to recent advances in numerical methods and high-performance computing, it is our wish that this issue reflects, in the truest sense, “Interdisciplinary Computation”, and highlights the latest trends in computational mechanics, addressing advances in multiscale and multiphysical methods, as well as other topics in related cutting edge research.

It is impossible to overstate the scientific accomplishments of John Tinsley Oden. Also, on the human side, it is equally impossible to overstate his genuine human warmth and his discipline of steel, which has its origins in his early life and upbringing.

Again it is a tribute of Tinsley to break new ground in scientific research that only a decade ago would have been unthinkable. One wonders what Tinsley will be working on at his 80th, 90th and 100th birthdays! In closing, it is our pleasure to honor Tinsley with this volume, and to collectively toast “happy birthday and many more to come”! "

Please join us in congratulating Professor Oden on this great honor.

• We are pleased to announce that Professors Ivo Babuska, Thomas J. R. Hughes and J. Tinsley Oden have been selected as Fellows of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) for their outstanding contributions to the fields served by SIAM.

They are among the distinguished members of SIAM in the initial class of Fellows. The creation of the SIAM Fellows program was approved by the membership last year.

"The initial Fellows were selected from among those SIAM members for which certain previous recognition places them clearly among those intended to be recognized by this program. This included members of certain national academies and corporate and laboratory fellowship programs, recipients of certain SIAM or ICIAM prizes, recent editors-in-chief of SIAM journals, and former SIAM presidents."

As Fellows, they will be recognized on the SIAM Fellows website, at the 2009 SIAM Annual Meeting Prizes and Awards Luncheon, in the prizes and awards brochure, in SIAM News, and in a press release issued by SIAM.

Congratulations to Professors Ivo Babuska, Thomas Hughes and Tinsley Oden.

• We are pleased to announce that Professor Thomas J. R. Hughes has been selected by the Engineering Mechanics Division of the American Society of Civil Engineers to receive the 2009 Theodore von Kármán Medal "for his outstanding contributions to computational solid mechanics, particularly in computational plasticity and finite element methods."

• We are pleased to announce that Rhys Ulerich, CAM Student, received a certificate of recognition by the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) for his exceptional service to the UT Austin Student Chapter of SIAM for 2008-09.

• We are pleased to announce the winners of the ICES Grand Challenge Faculty Awards for the 2009-2010 academic year: Chandra Bajaj, Jim Chelikowsky, Irene Gamba, Mary Wheeler, and Muhammad Zaman.

• We are pleased to announce that Professor Mary F. Wheeler has been selected the winner of the 2009 SIAM Theodore von Kármán Prize, one of SIAM's most distinguished prizes, and the SIAM SIAG/GS Career Prize.

• We are pleased to announce that Dr. Chandra Bajaj has been elected fellow by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), for his research in algorithms and data structures in computational geometry, image processing, data visualization and computational mathematics.

• We are pleased to announce that Dr. Jon Bass has been promoted to the title of Assistant Vice President for Research.

• Fort Worth Philanthropist Gives $18 Million for Endowment in Engineering Sciences

http://www.utexas.edu/news/2009/02/03/moncrief_engineering_sciences/

• The 2009 Finite Element Rodeo is being hosted at ICES by Dr. Graham Carey this February 27th and 28th.

Registration and more details can be found at http://www.ices.utexas.edu/ices/ferodeo/

• We are pleased to announce that Drs. T. J. R. Hughes, J. A. Cottrell and Y. Bazilevs have received the "Most Cited Author 2005-2008" Award for the paper entitled "Isogeometric analysis: CAD, finite elements, NURBS, exact geometry and mesh refinement."

• We are pleased to announce that Professor Thomas Hughes has been elected the recipient of a Humboldt Research Award for Senior U.S. Scientists in recognition of his past accomplishments in research and teaching. Professor Hughes is invited to undertake prolonged periods of research in collaboration with colleagues in Germany.

Congratulations on behalf of ICES.

• We are pleased to announce that Professors I. Babuska, R. Tempone and G. E. Zouraris have received the "Most Cited Author 2005-2008" Award for the paper entitled "Solving Elliptic Boundary Value Problems with Uncertain Coefficients by the Finite Element Method: The Stochastic Formulation."

This paper was published in the Elsevier Journal, Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering, Volume 194, Issue 12-16 (2005), Pages 1251-1294.

Congratulations on behalf of ICES!

• We are pleased to announce that Dr. Peter Rossky has received the 2009 American Chemical Society Physical Division Award in Theoretical Chemistry for his outstanding contributions in theoretical chemistry.

Dr. Rossky is the first recipient of this award.

More information can be found at:
http://hackberry.chem.trinity.edu/PHYS/

Congratulations from ICES.

• We are pleased to announce that Dr. Luis Caffarelli received the 2009 Leroy P. Steele Prize for Lifetime Achievement from the American Mathematical Society (AMS). This award is one of the highest distinctions in mathematics. The prize was awarded on January 6, 2009, at the Joint Mathematics Meetings in Washington, DC.

The following was taken from the AMS website:
"Luis Caffarelli is one of the world's greatest mathematicians studying nonlinear partial differential equations (PDE)," the prize citation states. "This is a difficult field: there are rarely exact formulas for solutions of nonlinear PDEs, and rarely will exact algebraic calculations yield useful expressions. Instead researchers must typically invoke functional analysis to build `generalized' solutions for many important equations. What remains is the profound and profoundly technical problem of proving regularity for these weak solutions and, by universal acclaim, the greatest authority on regularity theory is Luis Caffarelli... [He] has collaborated widely and directed many PhD students. He is extraordinarily generous, in both his personal and professional lives."

The full citation is attached and the UT article can be found at: http://www.utexas.edu/news/2009/01/07/mathematics_caffarelli/.

Congratulations to Dr. Caffarelli on behalf of ICES.

• We are pleased to announce that in 2008, the Special Achievement Award for Young Investigators in Applied Mechanics, an award given annually by the Applied Mechanics Division, of American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), has been renamed the Thomas J.R. Hughes Young Investigator Award.

• We are pleased to announce that our CAM student, Mauricio Santillana, has been selected as one of seven fellows of the 2008 Environmental Fellows at Harvard University. The two-year program was created to enable recent doctorate recipients to use and expand Harvard's extraordinary resources to tackle complex environmental problems.

• We are pleased to announce that Jim Rath has been chosen as the AMS Congressional Fellow for 2008-09 by the American Mathematical Society (AMS).

• We are pleased to announce that Dr. Ghattas' research team in ICES received the TeraGrid Capability Computing Challenge Award for a paper entitled "Towards Adaptive Mesh PDE Simulations on Petascale Computers" (by Carsten Burstedde, Omar Ghattas, Georg Stadler, Tiankai
Tu, and Lucas Wilcox).

• It is our pleasure to announce that Ludovic Chamoin has received the John Argyris Award for the best paper by a young researcher in the field of Computational Mechanics.

• We are pleased to announce that Mr. Peter O'Donnell, Jr. and Dr. Tinsley Oden have been elected members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences for their outstanding contributions to their profession, the nation, and the world.

• We are pleased to announce that Ludovic Chamoin, Dr. Oden’s Postdoctoral Fellow, was one of two winners of the 2008 Melosh Medal received during the 20th Annual Melosh Competition for the Best Student Paper in Finite Element Analysis.

Please visit http://imechanica.org/node/3121 for more information.

• We are pleased to announce that Dr. Tom Hughes has received the JSCES Grand Prize of the Japan Society for Computational Engineering and Science. It is the highest award of the society and he is the first recipient.

• We are pleased to announce that Dr. Robert Van de Geijn and Field Van Zee have made possible the release of libFLAME version 2.0 through a collaboration between UT Austin and UJI (Spain).

• We are pleased to announce that Dr. Mary Wheeler has been awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Engineering by the Colorado School of Mines Board of Trustees for her contributions to the curriculum and research of their institution. Dr. Wheeler will receive this award during the commencement ceremony on May 9, 2008. Congratulations, Dr. Wheeler!

• ICES has been selected by the Department of Energys National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) to develop new computer modeling techniques that can provide more reliable predictions of complex systems. Dr. Robert Moser is the Principal Investigator, and the Director of the Center for Predictive Engineering and Computational Sciences (PECOS). Read the UT article .