ATLANTA – March 8, 2010 – The Georgia Tech College of Computing today announced that it has formed the School of Computational Science & Engineering in partnership with the Colleges of Engineering and Sciences. The new school joins the School of Computer Science and the School of Interactive Computing as operating units resulting from College of Computing efforts to define and delineate the field of computing into focused bodies of study.

"Computation is now widely accepted, along with theory and experiment, as a crucial third mode of scientific research and engineering design," said Jim Foley, Interim Dean of Computing at Georgia Tech. "Our former dean, Richard A. DeMillo, deserves much of the credit for today’s news since the CSE Division was originally his brainchild. Dr. DeMillo's foresight is in keeping with tradition—the College of Computing has always been at the forefront of transformation, and it’s exciting to continue to lead in defining what the field will become."

Growing out of an initiative in high performance computing research, the School of Computational Science & Engineering (CSE) began in 2005 as a division of the College and led the creation in 2008 of CSE interdisciplinary graduate programs that span eight academic units across campus. It now includes other core research areas of the CSE discipline—such as massive scale data and visual analytics, machine learning, modeling and simulation, and algorithms for continuous and discrete models—many in collaboration with other units on campus. The school's education programs strive to create a new type of scholar who is well versed in synthesizing principles from mathematics, science, engineering and computing to innovate, create and apply computational models to solve important real world problems.

"Computing has become ubiquitous in engineering and science, in both education and research," said Dr. Don Giddens, Dean of the College of Engineering. "The new School of Computational Science and Engineering will add significant value to the growing importance of computational approaches in attacking disciplinary and interdisciplinary problems. The College of Engineering looks forward to expanding our joint faculty appointments and research programs."

Dr. Richard Fujimoto will chair the School of CSE, with a focus on building a diverse and multidisciplinary research ecosystem that includes collaborations with scientists and engineers across several application domains; increasing disciplinary strength in exascale, parallel and scientific computing, massive-scale data and visual analytics, and embedded computational systems for real-time decision making; establishing research collaborations in targeted application domains such as sustainable growth and energy, homeland security and defense, and computational life sciences; and creating an education pipeline of skilled, highly educated CSE professionals able to work effectively in multidisciplinary teams.

"The next decade is going to be an incredibly ambitious time for Georgia Tech, and the potential for major scientific impact will be driven by advances in the computational science and engineering discipline,” said Dr. Fujimoto, also Regents' Professor in the College of Computing. "Along with engaging in research at the technical edge of CSE, our mission is to significantly improve our students’ educational experience with novel teaching methods that focus on exploitation of technology, increased personal interaction and content creation."

Critical to the School's creation is the conviction that computational science and engineering is a discipline in its own right, with a distinct body of knowledge defined from the confluence of computing, mathematics, science and engineering, and that CSE fundamentally derives much of its richness and potential for impact from collaboration with other disciplines. The School of CSE is a highly interdisciplinary unit consisting of faculty from the original Computational Science & Engineering division within the College of Computing, including faculty with joint appointments in the Schools of Aerospace Engineering, Biology, Chemistry and Biochemistry, Physics and the Walter H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, as well as at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Emory University.

"The time is right for Computational Science and Engineering to become a school and Professor Richard Fujimoto is the ideal leader," said Dr. Paul Houston, Dean of the College of Sciences at Georgia Tech. "For several years the College of Sciences has supported joint faculty and developed collaborative programs with this thriving group of computational scientists and engineers.  Its interdisciplinary mission is both appropriate to Georgia Tech and essential for the world we live in, where the important problems require team approaches."

The School of Computational Science & Engineering will begin operation immediately.

For more information about the School of Computational Science & Engineering, visit http://cse.gatech.edu.

For information about interdisciplinary graduate programs in CSE, visit http://cseprograms.gatech.edu.