UCES Award Program - Past Winners

2011 – Charles Peck, Tom Murphy & Andrew Fitz Gibbon

Charles Peck (Earlham College) along with collaborators Tom Murphy Contra Costa College) and Andrew Fitz Gibbon, were presented with the 2011 UCES Award for their work on the Little Fe project.  A complete, six-node Beowulf-style portable computing cluster, Little Fe provides computational science educators with an affordable platform for parallel and distributed computing.  Peck, Murphy and Fitz Gibbon received their award during the Education Program Awards Ceremony at SC11 in Seattle, Wash.

 

2010 – Russell Manson & Scott Sinex

Announced during a special SC10 ceremony in New Orleans, La., Russell Manson of Richard Stockton College of New Jersey and Scott Sinex of Prince George's Community College received the 2010 UCES award.  Mason (top image, pictured right) was recognized for developing a complete undergraduate program in computational science, and Sinex (bottom image, pictured right) was honored for developing interactive spreadsheets to teach computationally-based concepts in freshman and sophomore chemistry and materials science classes.

Read more about Manson and Sinex's work in this press release.

 

photo of winners of 2009 UCES Award2009 – Shawn Sendlinger & Clyde Metz

The 2009 UCES award winners, announced at Supercomputing 2009 (SC09) in Portland, Oregon, are Dr. Shawn Sendlinger (middle), North Carolina Central University and Dr. Clyde Metz (right), College of Charleston. The award acknowledges them for their entry, "Computational Chemistry for Chemistry Educators."

Read more about the work of Drs. Sendlinger and Metz in this press release.

 

photo of winners of 2008 UCES Award2008 – Steven Gordon & Rubin Landau

Dr. Steven Gordon (right) of the Ohio Supercomputer Center was presented a 2008 UCES award for development of an innovative undergraduate minor program in computational science that spans nine Ohio colleges, including community and liberal arts colleges and large research universities. The minor program includes a rich set of courses in computational methods that cover the sciences and can be shared by all students in the program regardless of the school they attend.

Also receiving an award in 2008 was Dr. Rubin Landau (left) of Oregon State University.  Dr. Landau's award was presented for publication of "A Survey of Computational Physics: Introductory Computational Science." This text provides comprehensive coverage of modern issues in computational physics at the upper-division collegiate level. These include the role of high performance computing, a topic not generally covered in other texts. Inclusion of a CD-ROM with examples in several programming languages, animations, visualizations, and tutorials promotes active learning by students.

 

photo of winners of 2007 UCES Award

2007 – Wolfgang Christian & Bradley Efron

Dr. Wolfgang Christian (left), Davidson College, was selected as the 2007 UCES award winner for pioneering efforts in computational physics education. Dr. Christian and collaborators Mario Bellini, Anne Cox, Harvey Gould, Jan Tobochnik, and Douglas Brown developed the Open Source Physics (OSP) project that creates computer-based simulations for teaching introductory physics and published the computational physics textbook “Introduction to Computer Simulation Methods” (Gould, Tobochnik, and Christian).  The OSP project has also created a code library for teaching computational physics and is developing curricular material for upper level physics courses.

In addition, a UCES Certificate of Commendation was awarded to Dr. Bradley Efron (not present for a photograph), Stanford University, representing the Stanford Mathematical and Computational Science (M&CS) Program.  Established in 1972, the M&CS program utilizes courses from the departments of mathematics, computer science, management science and engineering, and statistics to create a program in applied mathematics with a strong computational science emphasis.  Tracks in engineering and biology were recently added to extend the breadth of the program which serves as one model for implementing computational engineering and science education in a research university.

 

photo of winners of 2006 UCES Award2006 – Rubin Landau, Angela Shiflet & Robert Panoff

A 2006 UCES Award was presented to Rubin Landau (second from right), Oregon State University, for publication of “A First Course in Scientific Computing: Symbolic, Graphic, and Numeric Modeling Using Maple, Java, Mathematica, and Fortran90” that introduces concepts of computational engineering and science using three programming paradigms with examples from physics, mathematics and other disciplines.

A 2006 UCES Award was also presented to Angela Shiflet (middle), Wofford College, for publication of “Introduction to Computational Science: Modeling and Simulation for the Sciences,” co-authored with George Shiflet, that effectively communicates the power of computational science using a variety of computational tools applied to several scientific disciplines.

A third 2006 UCES National Program Award was presented to Robert Panoff (second from left), Shodor Education Foundation. Inc., for implementation of the National Computational Science Institute, whose multi-year efforts to encourage and equip undergraduate faculty to teach computational engineering and science have had a major impact on the development of this interdisciplinary field.

 

2005 – Ignatios Vakalis & Tom Murphy

The 2005 UCES award went to Ignatios Vakalis (left), Professor of Math and Computer Science, Capital University.  He was awarded for the development of Computational Engineering and Science course material, distribution of web-based tools with cross-disciplinary impact, and establishment of the Keck Undergraduate CS&E Consortium.

Another entry was deemed to merit recognition as well; therefore, Tom Murphy (right), Professor of Computer Science, Contra Costa College, was awarded honorable mention for the development of a multi-node (up to 8) portable computational cluster (named Little-Fe) for educational use.