Undergraduate Computational Engineering and Sciences (UCES) Award Program

UCES Award logoThe UCES Award program was established in 2005 to promote and enhance undergraduate education in computational engineering and science (CES). By way of annual recognition, the award encourages the development of innovative educational resources and programs, recognizes the achievements of CES undergraduate educators, and serves to disseminate educational material and ideas to the broad scientific and engineering undergraduate community. UCES is funded by the Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellowship program administered by the Krell Institute.

The UCES Award recognizes undergraduate faculty who have recently developed courses, programs and/or curricular material. Such contributions need not be broad in scope but should be innovative and transferable to other institutions or programs. Faculty at any stage of their careers are encouraged to apply – particularly those who attended any of the several computational science education workshops (e.g., National Computational Science Institutes, Supercomputing Conference (SC) Education Program) along with graduates of computational science programs who have taken academic positions.

2012 Winners & Finalists

Drs. Downey, Toth and Franco took 2012's top UCES honors.Three individuals were named 2012 UCES Award winners and presented their work at the 2013 Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) Conference on Computational Science and Engineering in Boston, Mass. on February 28.

Allen Downey (Olin College of Engineering) was recognzied for his entry Complexity Science and Computational Modeling Class. Collaborators Jimmy Franco (Merrimack College) and David Toth (University of Mary Washington) also took top honors for Computational Laboratory Activities for Medicinal Chemistry.

Drs. Downey, Toth and Franco (pictured in order at right) each received a framed certificate and cash prize.  Charles Swanson, UCES Award chair, noted that judges felt that the two winning projects represented outstanding educational innovation in different areas of computational science. 

The following two UCES Award finalists were also recognized at SIAM:

  • Richard Braatz, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
    Computational Engineering and Science Software for Nanoscale Explorations
  • Richard Gass, University of Cincinnati
    Computational Quantum Mechanics in the Undergraduate Curriculum

Learn about past winners.