Alex's research interests are in computational science and engineering (CSE), high performance computing, and bioinformatics. Within CSE, his research is in combinatorial scientific computing (CSC), an interdisciplinary research area where discrete mathematics and algorithms are applied to formulate and solve combinatorial problems from the sciences and engineering. This work has been applied to modeling chromatographic separations in chemical engineering; controlling electric power grids; modeling electronic circuits and devices; visualizing organs as they deform during surgery; identifying protein biomarkers for lung and prostate cancer; and understanding the proteomics of the human T-cell leukemia virus, type 1.

Alex has held appointments in the computer science departments at Penn State, Waterloo, Wisconsin, Old Dominion, and ICASE, a research institute at NASA Langley Research Center.

Alex has mentored ten PhD students, six post-doctoral scientists, more than sixty Master's students, and several undergraduate researchers. His advisees hold appointments at Penn State, Waterloo, Australian National University, and Drexel; Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle; and Lawrence Livermore National Labs, Argonne National Lab, etc. He has been honored as the most inspiring teacher by both undergraduates and graduate students. He has also received an IBM University Research award.

Alex has led the effort to organize a CSC research community, chairing the first three international workshops in CSC, and serving as the Chair of the CSC steering committee. He is an editor of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) Journal on Scientific Computing, the Electronic Transactions on Numerical Analysis, and the SIAM Monographs in Computational Science and Engineering.

Alex Pothen is also the Director of the Combinatorial Scientific Computing and Petascale Simulations (CSCAPES) Institute, funded by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science for 2006-2011.

The CSCAPES Institute involves thirty researchers from Purdue, Sandia National Labs, Argonne National Lab, Ohio State, and Colorado State. CSCAPES researchers focus on computational tools in combinatorial scientific computing that enable large-scale computational models in science and engineering on peta-scale computers. These tools include parallelization and load-balancing software, automatic differentiation technology, parallel graph and sparse matrix algorithms, and transformations to improve the memory system performance of sparse computations.

In collaboration with colleagues at the Computing Research Institute at Purdue, Alex looks forward to advancing high-performance computations at the frontiers of science and engineering.