A committee of Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellowship (DOE CSGF) alumni and friends chose Ariel Kellison and Arianna Krinos Quinn as recipients of the 2025 Frederick A. Howes Scholar in Computational Science award. The annual prize goes to one or two recent fellowship alumni in recognition of their research accomplishments and outstanding leadership, integrity and character.
Howes, manager of the DOE Applied Mathematical Sciences Program, advocated for the fellowship and for computational science. Friends founded the award after his death in 1999 at age 51. The Krell Institute of Ames, Iowa, manages the fellowship and oversees the Howes Award.
The Howes scholars will each deliver a lecture and receive an honorarium and engraved award at the July DOE CSGF Annual Program Review in Washington.
About the awardees:
Ariel Kellison, a 2020-2024 fellow, earned her Ph.D. in computer science from Cornell University, specializing in program verification and type systems for rounding error analysis. Her research on type systems has been featured at leading conferences on programming language design. Currently a research engineer at the employee-owned company Galois, Kellison leverages formal methods to enhance the reliability of critical software across diverse application domains. The Howes committee described her as a “fearless mathematician, sophisticated scientist, and natural leader.”
At Cornell, Kellison developed software analysis tools capable of tracking floating-point errors throughout large-scale computations. She completed a DOE CSGF practicum at Sandia National Laboratories and subsequently served as a year-round graduate intern there, studying formal methods. Later, as a Sandia postdoctoral researcher, Kellison applied her doctoral research to build practical test suites for high-performance modeling and simulation software. In addition to her work at Galois, Kellison is a member of the review committee for the 2025 conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation.
Arianna Krinos Quinn, a 2019-2023 fellow, earned her Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology-Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Joint Program in Oceanography/Applied Ocean Science and Engineering. To help refine earth systems models, Krinos developed algorithms for classifying DNA sequenced from ocean microbes. Results from that project were published in Nature Communications. Krinos also completed two DOE CSGF practicums at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Joint Genome Institute studying microbial diversity.
Praised by the selection committee as “an extraordinary computer scientist and polymath able to drive research at the intersection of computing and the life sciences,” Krinos also is a dedicated educator and community scientist, having led seminars at MIT-WHOI and contributed to local environmental monitoring projects. As a Brown University postdoctoral researcher on the NSF-funded Center for Chemical Currencies of a Microbial Planet team, Krinos continues to explore the ecological significance of marine microorganisms.