Dr. Seid Koric has been awarded the 2025 Nancy DeLoye Fitzroy and Roland V. Fitzroy Medal from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME). The competitive national award, established in 2011, recognizes career-long achievements that advance the boundaries of engineering research.
Koric, a research professor in the Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering in The Grainger College of Engineering and the senior technical associate director at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, was recognized for his career of pioneering contributions to advanced and high-performance computing and artificial intelligence methods and applications in engineering, as well as their translation to industry practices by improving technology, efficiency, safety, and lowering environmental impact.
This marks the first time a University of Illinois nominee has received the Fitzroy Medal. Koric joins a group of distinguished award recipients, including a Nobel Prize winner and members of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE).
With Koric’s affiliations spanning across campus, this recognition highlights the collaborative spirit that drives innovation at the University of Illinois.
I am deeply honored and humbled to receive the Nancy DeLoye Fitzroy and Roland V. Fitzroy Medal, which perfectly aligns with my career-long commitment to push the boundaries of engineering research through advanced modeling, high-performance computing, and, more recently, AI-driven techniques. By harnessing these transformative tools, we can tackle today’s most pressing challenges and open new innovation frontiers for academia and industry.
Seid Koric, Senior Technical Associate Director at NCSA
After earning his doctorate in mechanical engineering at Illinois in 2006, Koric remained on campus to continue his work at NCSA, conducting cutting-edge applied research and providing consulting for the national academic and industrial computational communities on the center’s high-performance computing (HPC) platforms. He founded the modern private-sector program at NCSA, one of the largest and most successful industrial high-performance computing programs globally. He has collaborated with over 40 industry partners from manufacturing, aerospace, agriculture, energy, healthcare, and technology, representing hundreds of billions of dollars in economic development.
Koric has a deep scientific background in multiphysics modeling of complex engineering processes and extreme-scale high-performance computing in science and engineering. He is also actively working in the areas of material processing, advanced manufacturing, biomechanics, and fractal mechanics. He has published or contributed to more than 100 research papers and articles on a diverse range of topics.
Since 2019, Koric has led novel interdisciplinary applied research at Illinois, demonstrating how artificial intelligence with innovative machine and deep learning methods could assist and drastically accelerate (up to 100,000x) classical numerical methods and solve some previously considered unsolvable engineering and scientific problems in modeling, design, optimizations, sensitivity analysis, online controls, and digital twins.
Early in his career, Koric developed, implemented, and tested several ground-breaking numerical methods for solving highly nonlinear multiphysics and multiphase problems in materials processing. They have been used worldwide to optimize continuous casting and other steel-making processes and to minimize their defects and CO2 footprint.
Later, in a National Science Foundation-funded project, his team demonstrated for the first time that engineering commercial and open-source simulation codes, their algorithms, and solvers could efficiently run on hundreds of thousands of computational cores. On Blue Waters, he and colleagues solved previously considered impossible numerical simulations, such as high-fidelity multiphysics simulation of the human heart, large eddy simulations (LES), turbulent simulations of entire realistic engineering flows, or detailed reservoir simulation models of the complex subsurface flows of fluids in oil and natural gas reservoirs.
He is the recipient of notable accolades for his pioneering work, including the two top supercomputing achievement awards by HPCwire. He has achieved new world records in parallel scaling with both commercial and academic finite element codes and is one of the most prolific researchers on Blue Waters to date.
Throughout his work, Koric has ensured that the breakthroughs and advancements in computational methods and high-performance computing at NCSA and the University of Illinois can be translated to U.S. industry for its processes and practices in the global markets—giving him robust knowledge of the real-time needs of a wide variety of industries.
