Johann Rudi, a 2018 Ph.D. graduate of the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin, has won the institute’s 2019 Outstanding Dissertation Award. The institute requires that dissertations involve research in three areas—mathematics, scientific computation, and numerical analysis—as well as application to an important scientific or engineering problem.

Rudi’s award-winning dissertation, titled ​“Global Convection in Earth’s Mantle: Advanced Numerical Methods and Extreme-Scale Simulations,” addresses the problem of simulating convection in the Earth’s mantle. The dissertation was recognized for being ​“well written and describing an impressive and comprehensive body of work.”

Rudi joined the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at Argonne National Laboratory in 2018 as the J.H. Wilkinson Fellow in Scientific Computing. His current research includes methods and algorithms for complex implicit systems involving partial differential equations that can scale to extreme-scale computer systems with millions of cores.

Among his other awards Rudi was a 2015 Melosh Medal finalist, recipient of the Best Student Paper award in the 2016 Copper Mountain Conference on Iterative Methods, and a key part of the team that won the ACM Gordon Bell Prize in 2015 for high-performance computing.

The award-winning dissertation is available here.