Profiles series: Six questions for the 2016 NCSA Blue Waters Graduate Fellows

The Blue Waters Graduate Fellowships hosted by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is a year-long opportunity for Ph.D. students around the country to gain valuable experience with supercomputing and the chance to perform research on the fastest supercomputer on a university campus anywhere in the world.

The Graduate Fellows are expected to be far enough along in their graduate program to have decided to use high performance computing and/or data analysis as a primary part of their thesis research. The chosen Fellows are given an allocation on Blue Waters of up to 50,000 node-hours (1.6M core hour equivalents) in their first year in order to further pursue their research topic, as well as a stipend and tuition allowance. Further allocations are possible as they make progress towards their degree.

Follow throughout this series as we individually highlight the 2016 Blue Waters Graduate Fellows to learn more about their research. Profiles will be shared here, on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Let’s meet our 2016 NCSA Blue Waters Graduate Fellows:

• Andrew Kirby, University of Wyoming: High fidelity blade-resolved wind farm simulations
• Sean Seyler, Arizona State University: Developing a hybrid continuum-particle method for simulating large-scale heterogeneous biomolecular systems
• Sherwood Richers, California Institute of Technology: Monte Carlo neutrino closures in 3D GRMHD simulations of core-collapse supernovae and neutron star mergers
• Ronald Stenz, University of North Dakota: The impacts of hydrometeor centrifuging on tornado dynamics
• Michael Howard, Princeton University: Multiscale simulations of complex fluid rheology
• Elizabeth Agee, University of Michigan: Resolving plant functional biodiversity to quantify forest drought resistance in the Amazon
• Paul Hime, University of Kentucky: Resolving the deep branches in the Tree of Life with complex and highly parameterized Bayesian models of molecular evolution
• Erin Teich, University of Michigan: Glassy dynamics and identity crises in hard particle systems
• Iryna Butsky, University of Washington: The effect of cosmic rays on galactic magnetic field evolution

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