CAAM grad student wins Ken Kennedy-Cray Inc. Graduate Fellowship Award

BY DWIGHT DANIELS
Special to the Rice News

Saifon Chaturantabut, a doctoral student in the Department of Computational and Applied Mathematics (CAAM), has won the Ken Kennedy-Cray Inc. Graduate Fellowship Award for 2010.

	SAIFON CHATURANTABUT

The award, managed by the Kennedy Institute for Information Technology at Rice, supports graduate students involved in high-performance computing. It was established in 2007 by the supercomputer manufacturer Cray Inc. to honor the late Ken Kennedy, a Rice professor, computing pioneer and a former Cray board member.

Chaturantabut was recognized for her work on dimension reduction of nonlinear large-scale dynamical systems. Her goal is to reduce computational complexity and computational time in simulations while accuracy is maintained.

”Saifon’s research has clearly been transformative and has great potential,” said Danny Sorensen, the Noah Harding Professor of Computational and Applied Mathematics and Chaturantabut’s adviser.

Sorensen noted that his student has already produced impressive papers on her research and presented her work stateside and in Europe at various conferences and events. She is currently studying in the Netherlands with the Delft University of Technology Mathematical Physics group, where Sorensen is on sabbatical. She will present new findings there.

Chaturantabut received her undergraduate degree in math and a master’s degree in operations research and industrial engineering from Cornell University. In her four years at Rice, she has earned a second master’s degree in computational and applied mathematics and is headed toward a doctorate.

The scholar said she chose Rice for graduate school because of its strong research reputation and its high rankings. ”When I came to visit the CAAM Department after I got accepted, I was very impressed by the students and the professors,” she said. ”I felt it was going to be a supportive environment … and it is.”

Cray, a global leader in supercomputing, endowed the Ken Kennedy-Cray Inc. Graduate Fellowship with a $150,000 gift to Rice in 2007 after Kennedy’s death. The Kennedy Institute for Information Technology specializes in multi-institutional and multidisciplinary research in high-performance computing.

— Dwight Daniels is a science writer in the George R. Brown School of Engineering.