David Brown Honored with SIAM Prize for Distinguished Service to the Profession

David Brown, a special advisor to Berkeley Lab’s Computing Sciences Area and former Director of the Applied Math and Computational Research Division, was honored with a 2024 SIAM Prize for Distinguished Service to the Profession in recognition of his decades of commitment to enriching the computational science community. 

Brown has been a driving force behind the Computational Science Graduate Fellowship Program at the Department of Energy (DOE), designing, crafting, and leading a unique program for training Ph.D. students to become the next generation of computational scientists. He has contributed to several community studies, including the highly influential “Brown Report,” which was used as a roadmap for a decade of investments in applied mathematics both at the labs and in academia by the DOE. He was also part of the team that recently published the SIAM Task Force Report: The Future of Computational Science, which assesses this complex landscape and presents a strategic vision for the field in the United States for the next 15 years.

Brown has also been a tireless advocate for diversity and inclusion, as showcased by his leadership in starting the Sustainable Research Pathways program, which has supported hundreds of young scientists from minority-serving institutions and has become a role model for attracting underrepresented groups to the national labs. Brown’s efforts will continue to pay dividends to the SIAM community for many years to come. 

This prize will be awarded at the SIAM Annual Meeting (AN24), which will take place July 8-12, 2024, in Spokane, WA. Established in 1985 and originally intended to be awarded periodically, this prize is now awarded annually for contributions to the advancement of applied mathematics on the national or international level.