Lois Curfman McInnes works in the Mathematics and Computer Science Division of Argonne.  Her work focuses on high-performance computational science, with emphasis on scalable numerical libraries and community collaboration toward productive and sustainable software ecosystems.  She investigates numerical algorithms and software for the parallel solution of PDE-based applications and related optimization problems using the PETSc/TAO library. 

Lois serves as Deputy Director for the Software Technology focus area of the DOE Exascale Computing Project (ECP).  She also co-leads the IDEAS scientific software productivity project, which is partnering with the community to improve software productivity and sustainability as a key aspect of advancing overall scientific productivity.  Key initiatives that originated in the IDEAS project are the Better Scientific Software (BSSw) site (https://​bssw​.io), BSSw Fellowship Program, and the Extreme-scale Scientific Software Development Kit (or xSDK, https://​xsdk​.info). 

McInnes received a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from the University of Virginia in 1993. She serves on SIAM Council and the editorial board of SIAM News. She served as chair (2015-16) and program director (2013-14) of the SIAM Activity Group on Computational Science and Engineering; she served as co-chair of the 2018 SIAM Annual Meeting and served on the SIAM Education Committee (2015-2020). 

Research Interests

• high-performance scientific software ecosystems
• computational science and engineering
• scientific software productivity and sustainability
• numerical solution of partial differential equations and related optimization problems
• multiphysics algorithms and software

Awards, Honors & Memberships

• Member of ACM, IEEE, SIAM
• Named a SIAM Fellow, class of 2017
• 2017: Efficient management of parallelism in object-oriented numerical software libraries, by S. Balay, W.D. Gropp, L.C. McInnes, and B.F. Smith, published 1997, selected for the DOE Office of Science 40^th anniversary collection of 40 major papers that have changed the face of science
• Winner of the 2015 SIAM/ACM Prize in Computational Science and Engineering (with collaborators).
• Recipient of the 2011 Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award for outstanding contributions in research and development supporting the Department of Energy and its missions 
• Recipient of a R&D 100 Award in 2009 for PETSc (with collaborators)
• DOE Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow, 1993-1996

Select Publications

• L.C. McInnes, M.A. Heroux, E. Draeger, A. Siegel, S. Coghlan, and K. Antypas, How Community Software Ecosystems Can Unlock the Potential of Exascale Computing, Nature Computational Science 1, 92–94, Feb 2021.
• M.A. Heroux, L.C. McInnes, D. Bernholdt, A. Dubey et al., Advancing Scientific Productivity through Better Scientific Software: Developer Productivity and Software Sustainability Report, Jan 2020. 
• S. Abhyankar, G. Betrie, D. Maldonado, L.C. McInnes, B. Smith and H. Zhang, PETSc DMNetwork: A Library for Scalable Network PDE-Based Multiphysics Simulations, ACM Transactions on Mathematical Software, vol. 46, No. 1, April 2020.
• D. Katz, L.C. McInnes, D.E. Bernholdt, A.C. Mayes, N.P. Chue Hong, J. Duckles, S. Gesing, S. Hetrick, R.C. Jimenez, M. Pierce, B. Weaver, and N. Wilkins-Diehr, Community Organizations: Changing the Culture in Which Research Software Is Developed and Sustained, IEEE Computing in Science and Engineering (CiSE), vol. 21, issue 2, special issue on Accelerating Scientific Discovery with Reusable Software, March - April, 2019
• U. Ruede, K. Willcox, L. C. McInnes, H. De Sterck, Research and Education in Computational Science and Engineering,  SIAM Review, 60(3), pp. 707–754, Aug. 2018.
• D. E. Keyes, L. C. McInnes, C. Woodward, et al., Multiphysics Simulations: Challenges and Opportunities, special issue of the International Journal of High Performance Computing Applications, 27(1), 4--83, Feb 2013.
• W. Gropp, D. Keyes, L. C. McInnes and M. Tidriri, Globalized Newton-Krylov-Schwarz Algorithms and Software for Parallel Implicit CFD, International Journal of High Performance Computing Applications, Summer 2000 14: 102-136.
• S. Balay, W. D. Gropp, L. C. McInnes and B. F. Smith, Efficient Management of Parallelism in Object Oriented Numerical Software Libraries. In Modern Software Tools in Scientific Computing, E. Arge, A. M. Bruaset and H. P. Langtangen, editors, Birkhauser Press, pp. 163-202, 1997.