ACADEMIA

Springer recognizes Laura Alisic, Carsten Burstedde and Georg Stadler for their exceptional research on plate tectonics simulation

Springer has awarded the Computational Science and Engineering (CSE) Prize 2011 to Laura Alisic, Carsten Burstedde and Georg Stadler for their outstanding work on simulating global mantle convection at tectonic plate boundary-resolving scales. The CSE Prize, given for the second time, is accompanied by US $10,000. The award was presented to the scientists by Tora Aasland, the Norwegian Minister for Research, on 14 December 2011 at the Challenges in Computing conference at the Simula Research Laboratory in Lysaker, Norway.

Mantle convection is the principal control on the thermal and geological evolution of earth. The flow in the mantle drives plate tectonics and continental drift and, in turn, controls much activity ranging from the occurrence of earthquakes and volcanoes to mountain building and long-term sea level change. Despite the central role mantle convection plays in our understanding of earth, there are enormous first-order gaps in the knowledge currently available.

Dr. Martin Peters, Executive Editor of Mathematics and Computational Science and Engineering at Springer, said, "Modeling global mantle convection at tectonic plate boundary-resolving scales is one of the grand challenge problems in computational geosciences. The prizewinners' work represents a major advance in the geological understanding of the earth, and the team fully deserves to be awarded the Springer CSE Prize for the year 2011. Moreover, it is an outstanding example of the increasing use of CSE in geoscience."

Laura Alisic is a researcher at the Seismological Laboratory in the Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Carsten Burstedde until recently was a Research Scientist at the Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin. Two months ago he took over a professorship for Scientific Computing at the Institute for Numerical Simulation at the University of Bonn in Germany. Georg Stadler is a Research Scientist at the Center for Computational Geosciences and Optimization at the Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin.

The CSE Prize recognizes the importance of the cross-disciplinary, teamwork-oriented nature of computational science and engineering. Established in 2009, the prize is awarded biannually to teams of scientists, the members of which represent at least two different fields. In addition, prizewinners will not yet have reached the age of 40 years. The prizewinning team is selected by the editors of the Springer book series Lecture Notes in Computational Science and Engineering.