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Awards and Recognition | Mathematics and Computer Science

McInnes receives Distinguished Performance award

Dr. Lois Curfman McInnes, a senior computational scientist in the Mathematics and Computer Science division at Argonne National Laboratory, has won a 2021 UChicago Argonne Board of Governors Distinguished Performance Award.

The award recognizes McInnes’s outstanding record in developing innovative algorithms and toolkits that have made Argonne a world leader in high-performance numerical software.

I am deeply honored to receive this award,” McInnes said. Argonne continues to provide a superb environment to pursue exciting research that is transforming how large-scale software libraries are developed, maintained and used to solve some of the most challenging scientific and engineering problems facing our nation.”

McInnes received her Ph.D. in applied mathematics in 1993 from the University of Virginia. She was a U.S. Department of  Energy (DOE) Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow at Argonne and joined the laboratory in 1997.

Her early work focused on development (with colleagues Satish Balay, Barry Smith and others in the community) of the Portable, Extensible Toolkit for Scientific computing (PETSc); today PETSc is considered one of the most successful long-term software projects supported by DOE. McInnes’s current work focuses on advancing software productivity and sustainability, through her co-establishment of the IDEAS project and co-founding of the Better Scientific Software initiative.

McInnes has received several other honors and award, including co-recipient of the SIAM/ACM Prize in Computational Science and Engineering in 2015, the 2011 Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award, and an R&D 100 award in 2009 for PETSc. She was elected a SIAM Fellow in 2017 and in 2021 was named an Argonne Distinguished Fellow. She is currently the Deputy Director of the Software Technology area of the DOE Exascale Computing Project.

The  award will be given at the UChicago Argonne Board of Governors Awards ceremony to be held virtually on Tuesday, Nov. 16.