Keyes To Spend Sabbatical at KAUST

David Keyes, The Fu Foundation Professor of Applied Mathematics, will spend his sabbatical leave as inaugural Chair of the Division of Mathematical and Computer Sciences, one of four academic divisions at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia.

 

Beginning in the summer of 2009, Keyes will oversee KAUST's research and educational activities in applied and computational mathematics and computer science, while forging collaborations with the other science and engineering divisions in large-scale computational simulation.

 

"We are extremely pleased that David will use his sabbatical year to create a stronger relationship between our School and KAUST, which already partners with academic institutions such as Berkeley, Caltech, Cambridge, Chalmers, Cornell, Imperial, La Sapienza, MIT, Oxford, Stanford, Tokyo, Toronto, and Utrecht," said Gerald A. Navratil, SEAS Interim Dean. "We see this as a good opportunity for the School to continue to build our international academic connections."

 

"I am excited to be part of the establishment of the first independent university in Saudi Arabia," said Professor Keyes. "Out of the climax of the petroleum economy, powered by the information economy, KAUST will help forge future technologies of renewable energy and agriculture. My participation in SEAS's Global Development Team expanded my vision of what difference an individual faculty member can make. We've talked a great deal at SEAS about how to engage the world for mutual benefit and we've studied some failures as well as the few successes that are out there. KAUST appears poised for success in short order. When it came to my own sabbatical, I began to feel that it was up to me not just to think globally, but to act locally - on site!"

 

"What could be more fulfilling?" Keyes asks. "If we don't partner with them, other nations can and will, but higher education and computational science are things that the U.S. unquestionably still does best."

 

Keyes brings to this position experience leading multi-institutional projects in large-scale simulation for the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and the National Science Foundation and directing academic collaborations institutes at DOE laboratories and NASA. He has authored or contributed to eight federal agency reports since 2002 on the role of large-scale simulation in complementing experiment and theory in scientific discovery and engineering design, and he sits on advisory committees of the NSF, DOE, and PCAST for cyberinfrastructure and simulation.