In this video, Ian Foster from Argonne accepts his award naming him as one of the DOE Office of Science Distinguished Scientists Fellows. The newly established award, authorized by the America COMPETES Act and bestowed on National Laboratory scientists with outstanding records of achievement, provides each Fellow with $1 million over three years to be devoted to a project or projects of the Fellow’s choosing.
America’s unique National Laboratory system plays a critical role in ensuring our nation’s continued scientific vitality and leadership in science,” said Dr. Chris Fall, Director of the Department’s Office of Science. “This award acknowledges the extraordinary achievements of our National Laboratory scientists and at the same time provides an opportunity for some of our most talented researchers to forge new paths of discovery.”
Foster was honored “for trailblazing work in distributed and high performance computing with fundamental and long-lasting impacts on both computer science as a discipline and the practice of computing across the Office of Science.”
Foster’s research contributions span high-performance computing, distributed systems, and data-driven discovery. He has published hundreds of scientific papers and eight books on these and other topics. Methods and software developed under his leadership underpin many large national and international cyberinfrastructures.
Foster was one of five candidates were nominated by their individual laboratories and chosen by competitive peer review. The other 2019 Fellows include:
- Sally Dawson of Brookhaven National Laboratory, “for seminal contributions to the discovery of the Higgs particle through theoretical predictions, and a leadership role in thoroughly exploring the Higgs Boson and electroweak physics in research at particle accelerators.”
- Joshua Frieman of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, “for pioneering advances in the science of dark energy and cosmic acceleration, including leading the Sloan Digital Sky Survey-II Supernova Survey, co-founding the Dark Energy Survey and service as its Director.”
- Barbara Jacak of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, “for leadership in discovering and characterizing the hottest, densest matter in the universe–the quark gluon plasma–and in building collaborations and training scientists at the frontiers of nuclear physics.”
- José Rodriguez of Brookhaven National Laboratory, “for discoveries of the atomic basis of surface catalysis for the synthesis of sustainable fuels, and for significantly advancing in-situ methods of investigation using synchrotron light sources.”
The current fellowships represent the first cohort of a planned annual award, pending congressional appropriations. Awards were conferred at a ceremony at U.S. Department of Energy headquarters in Washington.
