Kate Heisey, an associate in Argonne’s Mathematics and Computer Science Division, has received a prestigious National Science Foundation graduate research fellowship.

Heisey is a graduate student at Washington University in St. Louis, where she is pursuing a doctorate in neuroscience. She was the first graduate student at the new Bagnall Lab at the university, which studies the neuronal basis of balance.

The 2016 NSF fellowship is awarded to individuals early in their careers who have demonstrated potential for significant achievement in science and engineering. The awardees receive three years of financial support, and their institution receives a cost-of-education stipend. The Graduate Research Fellowship Program is especially interested in promoting diversity, including the participation of women and underrepresented minorities, selected through a national competition.

“I am honored to have been chosen for this award,” said Heisey. ​“From my early work as a summer student at Argonne to recent work on fluid flow problems on leadership-class supercomputers, I have found research in the sciences to be both rewarding. I look forward to continuing to address challenging problems in the multidisciplinary area of neuroscience.”

After graduating with a bachelor’s degree from the University of Illinois in Chicago, Heisey joined Argonne as a scientific assistant (term), where she was a key developer of the Nek5000/Nekbone software for high-performance computational fluid dynamics simulations. She performed runtime studies on Argonne’s Blue Gene/Q computer and developed new support tools and methods to enable simulations with up to 2 billion elements. Heisey is coauthor of several publications, including most recently an article in the International Journal for High Performance Computing Applications.