Formation of School in Partnership with the Colleges of Engineering and Sciences Creates A New Kind of Science Scholar

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

"Computation is now widely accepted, along with theory andexperiment, as a crucial third mode of scientific research andengineering design," said Jim Foley, Interim Dean of Computing atGeorgia Tech. "Our former dean, Richard A. DeMillo, deserves much ofthe credit for today's news since the CSE Division was originally hisbrainchild. Dr. DeMillo's foresight is in keeping with tradition--theCollege of Computing has always been at the forefront oftransformation, and it's exciting to continue to lead in defining whatthe field will become."

Growing out of an initiative in highperformance computing research, the School of Computational Science& Engineering (CSE) began in 2005 as a division of the College andled the creation in 2008 of CSE interdisciplinary graduate programsthat span eight academic units across campus. It now includes othercore research areas of the CSE discipline--such as massive scale dataand visual analytics, machine learning, modeling and simulation, andalgorithms for continuous and discrete models--many in collaborationwith other units on campus. The school's education programs strive tocreate a new type of scholar who is well versed in synthesizingprinciples from mathematics, science, engineering and computing toinnovate, create and apply computational models to solve important realworld problems.

"Computing has become ubiquitous in engineeringand science, in both education and research," said Dr. Don Giddens,Dean of the College of Engineering. "The new School of ComputationalScience and Engineering will add significant value to the growingimportance of computational approaches in attacking disciplinary andinterdisciplinary problems. The College of Engineering looks forward toexpanding our joint faculty appointments and research programs."

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

"The next decade is going to be anincredibly ambitious time for Georgia Tech, and the potential for majorscientific impact will be driven by advances in the computationalscience and engineering discipline," said Dr. Fujimoto, also Regents'Professor in the College of Computing. "Along with engaging in researchat the technical edge of CSE, our mission is to significantly improveour students' educational experience with novel teaching methods thatfocus on exploitation of technology, increased personal interaction andcontent creation."

Critical to the School's creation is theconviction that computational science and engineering is a disciplinein its own right, with a distinct body of knowledge defined from theconfluence of computing, mathematics, science and engineering, and thatCSE fundamentally derives much of its richness and potential for impactfrom collaboration with other disciplines. The School of CSE is ahighly interdisciplinary unit consisting of faculty from the originalComputational Science & Engineering division within the College ofComputing, including faculty with joint appointments in the Schools ofAerospace Engineering, Biology, Chemistry and Biochemistry, Physics andthe Walter H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, as well asat Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Emory University.

"The timeis right for Computational Science and Engineering to become a schooland Professor Richard Fujimoto is the ideal leader," said Dr. PaulHouston, Dean of the College of Sciences at Georgia Tech. "For severalyears the College of Sciences has supported joint faculty and developedcollaborative programs with this thriving group of computationalscientists and engineers. Its interdisciplinary mission is bothappropriate 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.