Doug Kothe
Director
Exascale Computing Project at Oak Ridge National Laboratroy
Douglas B. Kothe has over three decades of experience in conducting and leading applied R&D in computational applications designed to simulate complex physical phenomena in the energy, defense, and manufacturing sectors. Kothe took over leadership of the United States Exascale Computing Project (ECP) last year, succeeding Paul Messina in that position. Prior to that, Kothe was Deputy Associate Laboratory Director of the Computing and Computational Sciences Directorate (CCSD) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). Other prior positions for Kothe at ORNL, where he has been since 2006, include Director of the Consortium for Advanced Simulation of Light Water Reactors, DOE’s first Energy Innovation Hub (2010-2015), and Director of Science at the National Center for Computational Sciences (2006-2010).
Before coming to ORNL, Kothe spent 20 years at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he held a number of technical and line and program management positions, with a common theme being the development and application of modeling and simulation technologies targeting multi-physics phenomena characterized in part by the presence of compressible or incompressible interfacial fluid flow. Kothe also spent one year at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the late 1980s as a physicist in defense sciences.
Kothe holds a Bachelor in Science in Chemical Engineering from the University of Missouri – Columbia (1983) and a Masters in Science (1986) and Doctor of Philosophy (1987) in Nuclear Engineering from Purdue University.