J. Tinsley Oden will receive the SIAM Prize for Distinguished Service to the Profession on Tuesday, July 7 during the annual meeting of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) in Denver, Colorado. Oden, Director of ICES at The University of Texas at Austin, will be honored for his tireless service to the applied mathematics and mechanics communities.
Oden is being recognized for numerous contributions. He has been actively involved in the creation of influential agency reports, most recently Revolutionizing Engineering Science Through Simulation, from the NSF Panel on Simulation-based Engineering of which he was Chair. Oden has also been instrumental in evolving a prominent institute during the emergence of computational science and engineering as Founding Director of the Institute of Computational Engineering and Sciences (ICES) at The University of Texas at Austin, created in 2003.
Tinsley has served academia, national laboratories, industry, and professional societies in several countries as an educator, consultant, program developer, and reviewer for more than four decades. A prolific researcher and writer, he injects the perspective of the mathematician--seeking to understand, quantify, and reduce error in engineering approximations--in whatever field he enters, and thus he continually expands the scope and relevance of SIAM itself.
Dr. Oden has worked extensively on the mathematical theory and implementation of numerical methods applied to problems in solid and fluid mechanics and, particularly, nonlinear continuum mechanics. His current research focuses on the subject of multi-scale modeling and on new theories and methods his group has developed for what they refer to as "adaptive modeling." Applications include semiconductors manufacturing at the nanoscale level. Dr. Oden, along with ICES researchers, is also working on adaptive control methods in laser treatment of cancer, particularly prostate cancer. This work involves the use of dynamic-data-driven systems to predict and control the outcome of laser treatments using the team's adaptive modeling strategies.
Established in 1985, the SIAM Prize for Distinguished Service to the Profession is awarded each year at the SIAM Annual Meeting to an applied mathematician who has made distinguished contributions to the furtherance of applied mathematics on the national level. The selection committee for the 2009 award included Douglas N. Arnold, University of Minnesota; Emmanuel Candes, California Institute of Technology; L. Pamela Cook, University of Delaware; Bruce Hendrickson, Sandia National Laboratories; Philip Holmes, Princeton University; David Keyes, Columbia University; and Cleve Moler, The MathWorks, Inc.
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The Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) is an international community of over 12,000 individual members, including applied and computational mathematicians, computer scientists, and other scientists and engineers. The Society advances the fields of applied mathematics and computational science by publishing a series of premier journals and a variety of books, sponsoring a wide selection of conferences, and through various other programs. More information about SIAM is available at www.siam.org.