Donation Funds New Computational Science Center at SBU

Stony Brook University is now home to a new academic center focusing on computational science thanks to an anonymous $10 million gift and matching funds granted by the Simons Foundation, the University announced Monday.

At the Institute for Advanced Computational Science, scientists will research, develop, and apply the principals of computational science to other areas of the scientific realm, including the physical sciences, life sciences, medicine, industry, and more.

The institute will work in close conjunction with Brookhaven National Laboratory's Computational Science Center.

"This magnanimous gift marks the successful culmination of our quest to become a national player in the race to harvest the technology of high-performance computing for scientific research," University President Samuel L. Stanley Jr. said in a statement.

Professor Robert Harrison will lead Stony Brook's Institute for Advanced Computational Science as its founding director and BNL's Computational Science Center as its director. Harrison, who comes to Stony Brook and BNL from the University of Tennessee and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, said in a statement that the Institute will be an interdisciplinary force in advancing the use of computers of all sizes and expanding their reach.

"Computation now pervades nearly all aspects not just of scientific discovery but increasingly our entire lives," Harrison said. "Numerically- and data-intensive computation, once dominated by the physical sciences and engineering, are now essential to fields as diverse as finance or medical imaging, and are transforming science and society, for instance, by understanding our proteome or predicting global trends."