Joined department: 2008

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.

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 combinatorial problems from the sciences and engineering. CSC links scientific computing to algorithmic computer science. Alex has contributed to several areas in CSE such as sparse matrix computations, graph partitioning, spectral graph algorithms, parallel computing, Automatic Differentiation, and computational systems biology. This work has applications 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.

Alex has mentored eleven 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, Oracle and Conviva Corporaton; and Lawrence Livermore National Labs, Pacific Northwest National Lab, Argonne National Lab, etc. He has been honored as the most inspiring teacher by both undergraduates and graduate students. He has received the Director's Silver Medal and a Distinguished Alumnus Award from the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi, the National Science Talent Scholarship, and 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 currently serves as the Chair of the CSC steering committee. He is an editor of the Journal of the A.C.M., and various book series and journals of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics: SIAM Books, SIAM Review, SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing, and SIAM Monographs in Computational Science and Engineering.