2014 Nominating Committee

• Marc Spiegelman, Chair, Columbia University
• Gary Glatzmaier, University of California, Santa Cruz
• Rowena Lohman, Cornell University

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2014 Candidates Statements

Executive Committee

*** Vote for 1 candidate ***

Carl W Gable Website
I have been involved with CIG since the earliest days having served a term on the very first CIG Executive Committee. At that time considerable effort went into developing the bylaws and governance structure of CIG as well as setting out the scientific goals. My involvement in CIG's scientific efforts have mostly been with the long-term tectonics and short-term crustal dynamics community for whom I hosted two of the crustal deformation workshops at Los Alamos National Lab and helped plan and participated in a series of yearly workshops that followed in Golden CO. My early work was in the geodynamics/mantle convection area but the majority of my current work is in mesh generation and model setup for geologic applications applied to computational flow and transport in porous media. I am group leader of the Computational Earth Science group in the Earth & Environmental Sciences division at Los Alamos National Lab.

Omar Ghattas Website
CIG has had an important impact on the fields of geodynamics and seismology by creating and supporting community codes covering a number of solid earth geophysical phenomena and supporting workshops on relevant topics. My background is broadly in computational mechanics, with specific interests in inverse theory, uncertainty quantification, HPC algorithms, and applications across several geophysical areas (mantle convection, seismic wave propagation, ice sheet dynamics, subsurface flows). My hope is to contribute my expertise to help CIG expand its scope in the coming years from forward to inverse problems and data assimilation, and from deterministic to stochastic models. My CIG involvement includes serving two terms on the SSC (2005-2010).

 

Science Steering Committee

*** Vote for 1 candidate in each category ***

COMPUTATIONAL SCIENCE

Jed Brown Website

I have served on the SSC since 2011, am a developer of PETSc, and have collaborated with various geodynamics projects.  I am especially interested in the development and use of state of the art numerical methods in forward and inverse models, verification, validation, and statistical analysis.  Computational geodynamics places unique demands on methods and it is valuable to understand these challenges, find robust solutions, and incorporate quality implementations into libraries.  I am passionate about reproducible science, open source development and community building, and the education and early career opportunities necessary to prepare the next generation of computational geodynamicists

Timo Heister Website
As a mathematician working in numerical methods, I bring a valuable outside perspective to the CIG community. I have been involved with CIG as one of the developers of the mantle convection code ASPECT and I bring many years of experience in software development to the table: I have been one of the maintainer of the finite element library deal.II for several years. My research focuses on massively parallel finite element methods for flow problems, so my work is applicable to several projects inside CIG. I see CIG as an immensely important project for the community and I would like to participate in shaping it's future. I will push towards better software methodology, advanced numerical methods, and more interoperability between the CIG projects.

GEODYNAMO

Jon Aurnou Website, YouTube
I am interested in pushing forward our ability, as a community, to realistically simulate turbulent dynamo generation in liquid metal planetary core settings. Towards this end, I believe CIG must continue to develop massively parallelized dynamo codes that are run on leadership class computing facilities.

Tom Clune Website
My professional interests are in the intersection of high performance computing and software engineering for scientific software. Appropriate investments in code design and testing can greatly accelerate the rate at which new capabilities and aggressive optimizations can be incorporated within complex numerical models. Throughout my career, I have used pseudospectral models, such as DYNAMO, as a testbed for exploring advanced techniques for design, refactoring and testing of scientific software. I am keen to share my experience with the CIG community as well as to learn from others that have strong interests in state-of-the-art scientific software.

LONG TERM TECTONICS

Dave May Website
My primary research activities relate to the usage and development of numerical methods and software relevant to studying the dynamics of the lithosphere. Whilst computing time at national high performance computing (HPC) centers is readily available, performant and robust tools for studying the dynamics of the lithosphere are, in my opinion, in their infancy and do not fully exploit the current infrastructure available. In recent years I have focused on the development of massively parallel software to enable high resolution, 3D regional scale geodynamic models. I believe that my experience in geodynamic modelling, HPC and software development for lithospheric dynamics would prove useful for many of the working groups within CIG. I am a long time participant of CIG activities and I am frequently involved in the meetings associated with the CIG LTT working group.

Eunseo Choi Website
My research interests include understanding long-term lithospheric deformation through numerical modeling. Through experience as a developer and an end-user of some of the CIG codes, I understand well what the long-term tectonic modeling community expects from CIG. By serving on the SSC, I would like to contribute to CIG's continuing efforts to forge long-term tectonic modeling software of community-wide use. In addition, my experience with one of the EarthCube Building Blocks projects will help prepare CIG software for interdisciplinary uses.

SEISMOLOGY

Arthur Rodgers Website
I have been involved with CIG as an institutional representative, through workshops and the Seismology Working Group. I am interested in helping CIG continue to support computational tools for solid earth geoscience. The near-term future will present opportunities and challenges for CIG codes to take best advantage of new architectures, improve user workflows and maintain relevance of CIG for a third proposal cycle. I would like to improve collaborations between academia, federally funded research labs and a growing international community of computational earth scientists.

Carl Tape Website
I consider myself a seismological representative to CIG, where I have served on the SSC and Seismology Working Group since 2010. I hosted the 2013 CIG-QUEST-IRIS seismology workshop in Fairbanks, Alaska, and my current goals are for CIG to sustain and improve existing CIG seismological codes (e.g., SPECFEM3D, MINEOS) and to encourage well-established codes to join CIG (e.g., AXISEM). I will also promote current efforts to establish HPC resources for the broad solid earth sciences community. I am open to feedback from anyone in the community (ctape@alaska.edu), and I welcome the chance to serve another term on the SSC.