Announcing the First Scientific Software Research Faculty Fellows
The Simons Foundation is pleased to announce the first recipients of its Scientific Software Research Faculty Fellowships. These fellowships will support new software-focused professor positions at academic institutions. In these roles, the fellows will develop scientific and mathematical software that will play a crucial role in enabling discoveries through data analysis, simulations, visualizations and calculations.
Through these fellowships, the foundation aims to stimulate the development and maintenance of core scientific software infrastructure in academic environments by creating a new, long-term, faculty-level career path.
The fellowships provide the fellows’ home institutions with 50 percent salary and benefits support for the creation of the new professorships. In addition, the fellows will each receive a $50,000 research allowance. The fellowships are funded by Simons Foundation International and administered by the Simons Foundation.
The program’s first cohort includes five new fellows.
At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Keaton Burns will work on the Dedalus Project, a tool for solving partial differential equations, which appear in problems in a wide range of fields ranging from fluid dynamics to quantum physics.
At the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Benjamin Cohen-Stead will contribute to software for tackling quantum many-body problems. Such software is critical to understanding materials with properties that arise from quantum mechanics.
Derek Davis will join the faculty at the University of Rhode Island and develop new data analysis software to maximize the scientific potential of next-generation gravitational wave detectors such as LIGO A# and Cosmic Explorer.
At Carnegie Mellon University, Rachel Kurchin will contribute to several projects related to the Julia programming language, which is widely used in fields such as data science, machine learning, modeling and simulation.
David Roe will continue his work on the L-functions and modular forms database (LMFDB), a critical tool for mathematicians working on problems in number theory and arithmetic geometry, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
