Building a Community of Leaders:
The Department of Energy’s
Computational Science Graduate Fellowship
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When created in the early 1990s, the Department of Energy’s Computational Science Graduate Fellowship (DOE CSGF) was a bold experiment—a unique multidisciplinary program focused on nurturing leading computational scientists. A decade later it’s clear the Fellowship was, and is, a visionary program: a pivotal strategic investment in attracting and training our nation’s foremost computational scientists.
The DOE Office of Science initiated the Fellowship program because of the critical importance of computational science to DOE’s core missions, and a profound recognition of our nation’s growing and continuing need for broadly trained advanced computational scientists in academia, industry and government laboratories.
Indeed, computational simulation is now science and engineering’s “third leg”—along with experimentation and theory. It’s crucial to the success of projects from the development of next-generation automobiles to the quest for fusion energy.
Critically, the Fellowship recognizes that the national academic environment is still working to develop graduate programs with the required mix of skills and knowledge for training leading computational scientists. Focused external support is needed to assist this process.
Thus, the DOE CSGF program is more than a traditional academic grant. It’s a fellowship with a mission. More than simply providing money, it has provided over 200 outstanding graduate students with guidance, support and community in preparing themselves as computational scientists.
The Fellowship—now jointly funded by the Office of Science and the National Nuclear Security Administration—requires that graduate students plan and follow a course of study that transcends the bounds of traditional academic disciplines. It requires substantive graduate work in each of a scientific or engineering discipline, computer science and applied mathematics. Fellows receive tremendous guidance and support to assist them in becoming scientists and engineers who are able to comfortably communicate across disciplines.
Fellows also participate in a 12-week research experience at a DOE lab. In keeping with the DOE CSGF’s interdisciplinary emphasis, this practicum must be in an area of research outside of the student’s thesis dissertation.
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Building on a decade of success, it’s apparent that the DOE CSGF is doing more than training individual leaders in computational science. It’s helping create a nation-wide interdisciplinary community. Currently it supports 70 students at 32 universities in 19 states. During the past dozen years, over 200 students at more than 50 U.S. universities have trained as Fellows. (The demand is only growing. In 2004, more than 325 high-quality applicants from across the United States applied for the 15 available Fellowships.)
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The Fellowship actively builds this community of leaders. Annually, the Krell Institute brings together Fellows at a three-day meeting in Washington, DC where they report on their research results and listen to plenary speakers highlight important, new research results. The meeting also acquaints Fellows with opportunities at DOE laboratories and serves as a tangible, public measure of the quality of the participants. DOE CSGF alumni, and the current Fellows, now form a core group of computational science leaders that joins industry, academia and DOE and other government labs in a range of more than 30 critical disciplines from bioinformatics to nuclear engineering and astrophysics. These alumni are bringing their diverse, top-level skills and knowledge to research teams at DOE labs, including Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories, Los Alamos National Laboratory and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. In 2002, a DOE CSGF alumnus received the DOE Early Career PI award. |
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In industry, alumni are helping push the traditional boundaries of high-performance computing. They are helping companies such as Lockheed Martin and Intel further excel in using computational simulation, and they are bringing the competitive advantages of advanced computational science to businesses like Procter & Gamble and Medtronics.
As faculty, they are sharing their expertise with students at universities from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to the University of Michigan and Stanford University.
Together and individually, these computational scientists are critical links in our nation’s innovation chain; the human capital that is helping ensure that the enormous potential benefits of advanced computational science are applied to solving our nation’s most complex 21st century scientific and engineering challenges.