Alex Pothen is a Professor of Computer Science at Purdue since August 2008. Alex was born in Munnar, a beautiful hill station in Kerala, India. He attended the Sainik School, Trivandrum from fifth to eleventh grades, and received a five-year Master's degree in Chemistry from the Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi in 1978, where he was a National Science Talent Scholar and receipient of the Director's Silver Medal. He received his PhD in Applied Mathematics from Cornell in 1984.

Alex received the George Polya prize in Applied Combinatorics from the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics in 2021, together with coauthors Assefaw H. Gebremedhin (Washington State University) and Fredrik Manne (University of Bergen), for their work on "graph coloring algorithms for computing Jacobian and Hessian matrices". He was named a Fellow of SIAM in 2018 "for advances in combinatorial algorithms for scientific applications and for leadership in founding the combinatorial scientific computing community"; a Fellow of ACM in 2022 for "contributions to and leadership in combinatorial scientific computing"; and a Fellow of the AMS in 2024. He was honored with the Graduate Mentoring award at Purdue, and named 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 (India), and an IBM University Research award. Alex's PhD thesis and papers with students have received honors in several best paper competitions: Householder Prize, SIAM Linear Algebra Activity Group Prize, best paper competition and Student Research competition at Supercomputing, Homeyer Prize, best poster prize at the CYTO conference (Annual Conference in Flow Cytometry), IEEE Data Science and Advanced Analytics (DSAA) 2021, etc.

Alex served as the founding Chair of the SIAM Activity Group on Applied and Computational Discrete Algorithms from 2018-2020. This community focuses on the design, theoretical analysis, computational evalution and deployment of algorithms for combinatorial problems formulated from applications. Earlier, he led the effort to organize the CSC research community in the early 2000's. He was Co-Chair of the first three international workshops in CSC.

Alex serves as an Editor of the Journal of the ACM (Scientific and High Performance Computing area), the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) Fundamental Algorithms book series, SIAM Classics in Applied Mathematics, SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing, and Optimization Methods and Software; he has served as an Editor of SIAM Books, SIAM Review, SIAM Monographs in CSE, SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing, the Electronic Transactions on Numerical Analysis, and the International Journal of CSE.

Alex served as the Director of the Combinatorial Scientific Computing and Petascale Simulations (CSCAPES) Institute, a pioneering research project in CSC funded by the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science from 2006-2012. The CSCAPES Institute involved thirty researchers from Purdue, Old Dominion University, Sandia National Labs, Argonne National Lab, Ohio State, and Colorado State. CSCAPES researchers developed computational tools in CSC that enable large-scale computational models in science and engineering on peta-scale computers. These tools included 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 is a co-PI on the ExaGraph project (a centre funded by the Exascale Computing Project of the Department of Energy and the NNSA), led by his former student, Mahantesh Halappanavar.

Alex has mentored sixteen PhD students, six post-doctoral scientists, more than sixty Master's students, and several undergraduate researchers. His advisees hold (or have held) appointments at Indiana University, Washington State University, Vanderbilt, Penn State, Waterloo, Australian National University, Drexel, and King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals (Saudi Arabia); Google, Microsoft, Meta, IBM, Oracle, and Conviva Corporation; and Lawrence Berkeley Lab, Lawrence Livermore National Labs, Pacific Northwest National Lab, Argonne National Lab, etc.

Alex and his wife Madhubala Bobbie (nee Londhe) have four adult children, a son-in-law, a daughter-in-law and three grandchildren.