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

Mon, Nov 23 (Time: 2:00 — 3:30 PM) Amit Meller — Department of Biomedical Engineering Department of Physics Boston University ICES Seminar - Molecular Biophysics Series: “From DNA capture to DNA sequencing using solid-state nanopores”

Tue, Dec 1 Ricardo Nochetto — Professor, Dept. of Mathematics, University of Maryland ICES Seminar: “Quasi-optimal Convergence Rates for Adaptive cG and dG FEM”

Wed, Dec 2 (Time: 4:00 — 5:00 PM) John Schotland — Program in Applied Mathematics and BME, University of Pennsylvania ICES Seminar: “Optical Tomography”

• We are please to announce that Professor Chandra Bajaj has been invited to become a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for his outstanding achievements in computer science and information technology.

"The ACM Council established the Fellows Program in 1993 authorizing that the designation "ACM Fellow" be conferred on those who have distinguished themselves by outstanding technical and professional achievements in information technology, and who are currently members of ACM and have been members for the preceding five years. This distinction will be awarded to a select number of ACM members whose accomplishments have made them eligible for this very high technical honor."

The induction of the ACM Fellows will be held in June 2010 at the ACM Awards Banquet in San Francisco.

Official word from the ACM shall be issued as a press release later this month, only after which UT will be allowed to issue a press release.

Congratulations to Professor Bajaj on behalf of ICES.

• We are pleased to announce that the Czech Society for Mechanics has "bestowed the Honorary Membership to Professor Ivo Babuska for his distinctive contributions to engineering, science, research and other pursuits allied with and beneficial to the cooperation between scientific institutions and universities throughout the world, and for his unique role in the education and encouragement of a new generation of scientists, and last but not least, for his long-term active support of the Society's activities."

Congratulations to Professor Babuska on behalf of ICES.

• The next AM³ conference Algorithms in MacroMolecular Modeling will be held in Austin Texas November 11-15, 2009.

• A Joint ICES/CNA-FRG Workshop entitled "Analytical and numerical issues on quantum, kinetic and statistical evolution" will be presented in the ACE Building on October 9-10, 2009. Seminars will be presented on Friday October 9, in ACE 4.304 from 8:30am to 5:30pm and on Saturday, October 10, in ACE room 2.402 from 9:30am to 3:30pm. (It is not necessary to register for this event.)

For the full agenda and additional information, please see: http://www.ices.utexas.edu/amg/ices-cna-frg-workshop.html.

• We are pleased to announce that the Executive Council of the International Association of Computational Mechanics has accepted Professor J. Tinsley Oden as Ordinary Member of the General Council.

Congratulations Professor Oden.

• We are pleased to announce that Professor Lexing Ying is the 2009 recipient of the National Science Foundation Career Award.

Congratulations to Professor Ying from ICES.

• We are pleased to announce that the Executive Council of the International Association of Computational Mechanics has accepted Professor Leszek Demkowicz as Ordinary Member of the General Council.

Congratulations Professor Demkowicz.

• We are pleased to announce that the Executive Council of the International Association of Computational Mechanics has accepted Professor Thomas J. R. Hughes as Ordinary Member of the General Council.

Congratulations Professor Hughes.

• We are pleased to announce that Professor Robert Moser has been named Deputy Director of ICES beginning September 2009. Dr. Moser will assist in managing a growing list of administrative responsibilities at ICES while continuing his role as Director of Pecos.

Please join us in congratulating Dr. Moser for his new appointment and for accepting an important role in managing the Institute.

• We are pleased to announce that Professor Peter Rossky has been named the recipient of the Joel Henry Hildebrand Award in the Theoretical & Experimental Chemistry of Liquids sponsored by ExxonMobil Research & Engineering. He will be honored at the Awards Ceremony on Tuesday, March 23, 2010, in conjunction with the 239th ACS National Meeting in San Francisco.

The winners of the national awards of the American Chemical Society for 2010 have been published in Chemical & Engineering News: http://pubs.acs.org/isubscribe/journals/cen/87/i08/html/8708awards11.html.

Learn more about the Joel Henry Hildebrand Award in The Theoretical & Experimental Chemistry of Liquids at this website:
http://pubs.acs.org/isubscribe/journals/cen/87/i08/html/8708awards3.html.

Congratulations to Peter Rossky on behalf of ICES.

• We are pleased to announce that Professor Keshav Pingali has been asked to serve on the CISE Advisory Committee for the National Science Foundation. He will serve a two-year term covering parallel computing and scientific computing, but more generally software and hardware foundations.

• We are pleased to announce that Professor J. Tinsley Oden has been selected to receive the University Cooperative Society's 2009 Career Research Excellence Award. Professor Oden was selected by a panel of previous award winners and other faculty members. An awards banquet honoring all nominees will be held in October at the Four Seasons Hotel. During the banquet, the Cooperative Society will highlight Professor Oden's achievements by presenting him with a check for $10,000.

Congratulations to Professor Oden on behalf of ICES.

• We are pleased to announce that Danhua Shao, graduate student from ECE, and Professors Sarfraz Kurshid and Dewayne E. Perry received the Best Paper Award at the 20th Australian Software Engineering Conference for their paper entitled "Semantic Impact and Faults in Source Code Changes: An Empirical Study."

Congratulations on behalf of ICES.

• We are pleased to announce that CAM student Toby Issac was awarded the Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellowship. Toby was one of 16 students nation-wide to receive this fellowship. Please see the announcement below.

Congratulations on behalf of ICES.

Department of Energy Awards 16 Computational Science Graduate Fellowships

Ames, Iowa (May 11, 2009) – In 1991, in an effort to address the shortage of computational scientists in the United States, the Department of Energy developed an innovative fellowship program. Now in its eighteenth year, the Department of Energy’s Computational Science Graduate Fellowship (DOE CSGF) continues its commitment to training the next generation of scientific leaders as it welcomes 16 new students to the program.

Jointly funded by the Office of Science and the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Office of Defense Programs, the DOE CSGF provides up to four years of support to students pursuing a doctoral degree in areas of study that focus on the use of high-performance computing technology to solve complex problems in science and engineering. Students selected for the fellowship enter the program with a background in a scientific or engineering discipline, computer science, or applied mathematics ? and agree to study and conduct research in computational science or engineering.

As part of the program, DOE CSGF recipients are provided benefits that include a yearly stipend of $32,400, payment of all tuition and fees, an annual academic and conference travel allowance, and one-time matching funds for a computer workstation. Fellows in this program participate in a highly regarded annual fellowship conference and must complete a three-month practicum at one of 17 Department of Energy laboratories.

In order to be considered for this highly competitive fellowship, each applicant must provide a transcript, GRE scores, and a detailed program of study; in addition, three letters of reference are required from advisors, instructors and employers familiar with the applicant’s background and capabilities. These materials undergo careful scrutiny by a committee of distinguished individuals representing academia and the DOE national laboratories.

The Krell Institute, fellowship program administrator, takes pleasure in announcing the awardees for the 2009-2010 academic year:

Edward Baskerville
University of Michigan
Ecology

Kathleen Beutel
University of Minnesota
Computational Chemistry

Sanjeeb Bose
Stanford University
Mechanical Engineering

Kurt Brorsen
Iowa State University
Physical Chemistry

Jeffrey Donatelli
University of California, Berkeley
Applied Mathematics

Piotr Fidkowski
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Computational Solid Mechanics

Virgil Griffith
California Institute of Technology
Computation and Neural Systems

Tobin Isaac
University of Texas at Austin
Computational and Applied Mathematics

Mark Maienschien-Cline
University of Chicago
Physical Chemistry

Noah Reddell
University of Washington
Computational Plasma Modeling for Fusion Energy

Troy Ruths
Rice University
Bioinformatics

Samuel Skillman
University of Colorado at Boulder
Astrophysics

Hayes Stripling
Texas A&M University
Computational Science

Travis Trahan
University of Michigan
Nuclear Engineering

Sean Vitousek
Stanford University
Environmental Fluid Mechanics and Hydrology

Norman Yao
Harvard University
Condensed Matter Physics

• We are pleased to announce that the paper authored by Reza Soheilifard, Dmitrii E. Makarov and Gregory J. Rodin entitled "Critical evaluation of simple network models of protein dynamics and their comparison with crystallographic B-factors" was selected for the 2008 Highlights of the journal Physical Biology.

The collection of articles highlights the very best research published in Physical Biology in 2008. The articles can be found at: http://www.iop.org/EJ/journal/-page=extra.2008Highlights/1478-3975.

"Articles were selected for their presentation of outstanding new research, receipt of the highest praise from our international referees, and the greatest number of downloads from the journal website, providing a taste of the journal's overall content. All of these articles are available completely free to read until 31 December 2009."

Congratulations on behalf of ICES.

• 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 .