Barba for SIAM CSE Vice-Chair

The Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) Activity Group in Computational Science and Engineering (CSE) is electing new officers for 2017–2018. Prof. Lorena A. Barba was nominated for the position of Vice-Chair.

Here are Barba's election statement and SIAM biography.

Members of SIAG/CSE received voting instructions via email on Oct. 31. Voting is open until Dec. 2, 2016. Send questions on the election to snell@siam.org

Candidate Statement

I am strongly committed to education in computational science and engineering and would like to see computing penetrating infrastructurally across the curriculum. I forcefully push for open-source software in science and education, and for raising the quality and sustainability of research software. I want to see standards of reproducible research spread wide in our community. I recognize among our biggest challenges evolving the research software ecosystem under the pressure of changing hardware architectures. I aspire to our community becoming more inclusive and engaging earnestly with all groups, attracting young talent widely.

Professional Experience

Associate Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the George Washington University since 2013, previously Assistant Professor of MechEng at Boston University since 2008, and Lecturer in Applied Mathematics at the University of Bristol, U.K. from 2004 to 2008. While in the U.K., developed a proposal for European funding of a network involving 10 institutions of higher education in Europe and Latin America: "Scientific Computing Advanced Training," which was funded with a total budget of 1.34 million euro to support international conferences and mobility grants for 30 graduate students. While at Boston University, organized two large training events in scientific computing with funding from the NSF Pan-American Advanced Studies Institute program: "Scientific Computing in the Americas: the challenge of massive parallelism" (2011) and "The science of predicting and understanding tsunamis, storm surges and tidal phenomena" (2013). Continuing with a long-standing commitment to educating more computational scientists, in 2014 created the indie MOOC (massive open online course) "Practical Numerical Methods with Python," which is now in its third year and is nearing 7,000 users. The course is fully open source and has attracted collaborators teaching similar courses in the UK, Belgium and Chile. Currently leads a computational research group with five PhD students, and has graduated four students that have successful careers in both academia and industry (see: https://lorenabarba.com/people/).

Education

PhD Aeronautics, California Institute of Technology (USA).
BSc, PEng Mechanical Engineering, Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María (Chile)

SIAM Activities/Roles

SIAM member since 2008. In 2013, organized MS132: "Applications and New Developments in Fast-multipole and Tree-based Methods" at the SIAM CSE Conference in Boston. Invited presenter at the 2014 SIAM UQ Conference, MS42 "The Reliability of Computational Research Findings: Reproducible Research, Uncertainty Quantification, and Verification & Validation." In the 2015 SIAM CSE Conference at Salt Lake City, organizer of the featured minisymposium MS27 "Fast multipole methods maturing at 30 years," invited speaker in the minisymposium MS78 "Teaching Computational Thinking and Practice," invited speaker in the special panel PD3 "The Future of CSE as a Discipline."

Professional Memberships: SIAM, ACM, APS, AIAA

Research Interests:

Computational fluid dynamics, aerodynamics, animal flight; biophysics, protein-surface interactions; fast multipole methods, boundary element methods, immersed boundary methods; software sustainability, open science, reproducibility.

Awards/Honors: NSF CAREER 2012, CUDA Fellow 2012

Lorena A. Barba, Associate Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, The George Washington University

Personal Web Page URL/Email address:
https://lorenabarba.com
labarba@gwu.edu

Update

The votes are in, and Professor Barba was elected to SIAM SIAG CSE Vice-Chair for the 2017–2018 period. Thank you for your votes!