Alex Pothen

I am a Professor of Computer Science at Purdue. My research interests are in combinatorial scientific computing (CSC), graph algorithms, parallel computing, and bioinformatics algorithms. I am a Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM, 2018), the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM, 2022), and the American Mathematical Society (AMS, 2024).
I also received the George Polya prize in Applied Combinatorics for 2021 from SIAM. I have served as the founding Chair of the SIAM Activity Group on Applied and Computational Discrete Algorithms.

Highlights from our research group:
Prof. John R. Gilbert (UC Santa Barbara), one of the founding researchers in combinatorial scientific computing, turns 70 this year! A conference was organized to celebrate his achievements and students, on June 3, 2023 in Santa Barbara! The program for the meeting, slides of talks, and a group photograph are available here.

I am thankful to my students and colleagues who have collaborated with me on our research that led to my recognition as a Fellow of the AMS (2024).
Here is the Purdue story.

S M Ferdous, who completed his PhD in 2021, is the Linus Pauling Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow at Pacific Northwest National Lab from July 2022. Congratulations, Ferdous, and we are looking forward to your future research accommplishments! Here is the Purdue story.

On Youtube, SIAM has created a video on the prizes awarded at the SIAM Annual Meeting 2021, which included the George Polya Prize in Applied Combinatorics..
The transcript of an interview with my coauthors Assefaw Gebremehin, Fredrik Manne and me, on "efficient graph coloring algorithms and codes with applications to Jacobian and Hessian matrix computations" is SIAM News Spotlight.
Here is a story from Purdue News.

Our work in the ExaGraph project on scalable graph algorithms has been featured in a podcast from the Exascale Project:
Applying graph algorithms to solve key science problems.
The story is also available from HPC Wire.

Our research is supported by grants from NSF, Department of Energy, The Exascale Computing Project, and an Intel Parallel Computing Center. More news at the column on the right.