Salman Habib is the Director of Argonne’s Computational Science (CPS) Division and an Argonne Distinguished Fellow. He holds a joint position in Argonne’s Physical Sciences and Engineering (PSE) Directorate, and has joint appointments at the University of Chicago and Northwestern University. Habib’s interests cover a broad span of research, ranging from quantum field theory and quantum information, the quantum-classical transition, properties of geomaterials,  and the formation and evolution of cosmological structures. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and was awarded the IEEE Computer Society’s Sidney Fernbach Award in 2020.

Habib has been deeply involved in the application of large-scale supercomputing to attacking problems in the physical sciences, including beam dynamics in accelerators, nonequilibrium quantum and classical field theory, quantum dynamical systems, and the formation of cosmic structure. This has led to algorithm and code development on a variety of platforms, beginning with the Connection Machines in the early 1990′s and leading on to the exascale systems, Aurora and Frontier, at Argonne and Oak Ridge. Over the last two decades, he has led efforts — with cosmology as the primary arena — to apply advanced statistical methods to complex inference problems with very large datasets, using supercomputer-based forward model predictions. These efforts have motivated forays in the application of AI-based methods for scientifc problems. Habib led the ExaSky effort within DOE’s Exascale Computing Project (ECP), and is a member of the cosmological surveys, Cosmic Microwave Background – Stage IV (CMB-S4), Rubin Observatory’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), and the NASA mission SPHEREx.

Habib received his Ph.D. from the University of Maryland in physics after carrying out his undergraduate work at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, India. Following his PhD, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of British Columbia, and later, a postdoc and staff member in the Theoretical Division at Los Alamos National Laboratory, before moving to Argonne in 2011.