SCIENCE & ENGINEERING NEWS

Berkeley, Calif. — The U.S. Department of Energy’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) is now accepting applications for the Luis W. Alvarez Post-Doctoral Fellowship.

The fellowship, located at NERSC at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, was established to encourage the development and application of tools to advance scientific research. The fellowship enables a recent graduate with a Ph.D. (or equivalent) to acquire further scientific training and to develop professional maturity for independent research. Applicants must be recent graduates (within the past four years) with a strong emphasis on computing or computational science.

The Alvarez Fellowship is offered as a 1-year term appointment with the possibility of a 1-year renewal. The successful applicant will be compensated with a competitive salary and excellent benefits. Additionally, the successful candidate will have access to NERSC’s high-performance computing resources. The successful applicant is expected to be involved in one of the areas that currently have post-doctoral openings, and will be assigned a scientific mentor.

For more information on the Luis W. Alvarez Post-Doctoral Fellowship, please refer to http://www.nersc.gov/research/alvarez.html. For currently available post-doctoral openings, please see http://www.lbl/gov/CS/Careers/CJO-NERSC.html

Applications are due by April 1, 2001, for an appointment to coincide with the coming academic year. Interested applicants should submit a letter of application, resume and three letters of reference by email to Diane Heim ([email protected]) or by standard mail to: Luis W. Alvarez Postdoctoral Fellowship c/o Diane Heim Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory 1 Cyclotron Road, MS 50B-4230 Berkeley, CA 94720

The fellowship is named for Dr. Luis W. Alvarez, the Nobel Laureate and physicist who worked at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. In the 1950s, Dr. Alvarez opened a new era in high-energy physics research with his proposal to build a pressurized chamber filled with liquid hydrogen. Known as a “bubble chamber,” this device would allow scientists to discover new particles and analyze their behavior. In his 1955 prospectus for such an experimental facility, Dr. Alvarez became one of the first scientists to propose using computing devices for analyzing experimental data, even before such computers were actually available.

By the 1960s, Dr. Alvarez’ vision was reality. His colleagues at Berkeley Lab were using computers to track some 1.5 million particle physics events annually and developed scientific computing techniques which were adopted by researchers around the world. This effort led to Dr. Alvarez receiving the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1968.

NERSC, which is located at Berkeley Lab, operates one of the nation’s most powerful supercomputing centers dedicated to unclassified research and also conducts computer science research. NERSC provides high-performance computing tools and expertise that enable computational science of scale, in which large, interdisciplinary teams of scientists attack fundamental problems in science and engineering that require massive calculations and have broad scientific and economic impacts.

“NERSC is proud to offer the Luis W. Alvarez Fellowship in Computational Science as another means of helping educate the next generation of computational scientists,” said NERSC Director Horst Simon. “We encourage those who share Dr. Alvarez’ scientific curiosity and dedication to join us in our efforts.”

For more information about additional opportunities in Computing Sciences, please visit our web site at http://www.lbl.gov/CS/Careers .

Additional information about NERSC is available at www.nersc.gov. Berkeley Lab ( http://www.lbl.gov ) conducts unclassified research and is managed by the University of California for the U.S. Department of Energy.

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