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Richard Tran Mills

Computational Scientist

Biography

Richard Tran Mills received his Ph.D. in computer science, with a concentration in computational science, from the College of William and Mary in 2004, where he was supported by a Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellowship. Dr. Mills has over two decades of experience in parallel and high-performance computing applied to a wide range of scientific problems. He was a staff member at Oak Ridge National Laboratory from 2004 to 2010, spending time in the National Center for Computational Sciences, the Computer Science and Mathematics Division, the Environmental Sciences Division, and the Climate Change Science Institute. From 2010 to 2014, he held a joint faculty appointment in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville; and from 2014 to 2017 he was at Intel Corporation, where he led efforts to identify and exploit opportunities for weather, climate, and Earth system models to leverage next-generation high-performance computing platforms. He is one of the original authors of the open-source, massively parallel hydrologic flow and reactive transport code PFLOTRAN, and is a core developer of the Portable, Extensible Toolkit for Scientific Computation (PETSc), which provides the underlying computational framework for PFLOTRAN and many other scientific simulation codes.

For more details about Dr. Mills and his research interests, please visit his professional webpage.

Research Interests

  • Parallel and high-performance computing
  • Computational science and scientific computing
  • Computational geosciences, especially hydrology
  • Geospatiotemporal data mining and machine learning
  • Numerical methods and software for the solution of sparse linear and non-linear systems of equations