I have joined the Department of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics (APAM) at Columbia University as the Fu Foundation Professor of Applied Mathematics. I moved to Manhattan in August 2003, and live in university housing within walking distance of Columbia's main campus in the Morningside Heights neighborhood.

Columbia has an excellent Applied Mathematics program of which half of the faculty are stellar assistant professors hired within the past three years. Surrounding programs in Applied Physics, Biology, Chemistry, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Materials Science, and Physics have significant computational strengths, and there is a natural opportunity to involve these in an interdisciplinary computational science community, with Computational Mathematics as a curricular hub. The programs listed above recently secured resources to build a distributed scientific computing facility and a corresponding cluster of graduate courses. The University has one of NSF's six nanotechnology research centers and is a major center for DOE fusion energy research, these applications representing two of my new interests. NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, primarily concerned with global climate change, another new application interest, is in a Columbia building and its personnel are tightly integrated with the APAM Department. The Department and I agree that my research program in parallel algorithms for simulation of PDE-based systems will fit naturally into this scientific milieu. I will collaborate immediately in many of these computational endeavors, in research and pedagogy, and the challenges they will provide are sure to stimulate new computational mathematics.

In view of my present heavy (approximately 50% time) involvement in Department of Energy computational programs, including extensive travel to DOE laboratories, one of my original goals in a move was to land in a joint university-laboratory appointment. I seriously considered three such attractive combination offers, in which a lab with which I collaborate is run by a university: Argonne/University of Chicago, Livermore/University of California, and Oak Ridge/University of Tennessee. It is ironic, given the original emphasis of the search, that we will not end up at one of these; however, my family's geographical preferences prevailed! Fortunately, Columbia is one of six strategic partners of Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, and my research program at Columbia will initially be supported in part by Brookhaven. There, I will be able to work with current DOE SciDAC collaborators at BNL's Center for Data Intensive Computing , and also with SciDAC partners building the 5 Tflop/s QCDOC computer for Lattice Quantum Chromodynamics. Besides Brookhaven, Columbia offers immediate proximity to the Courant Institute, where I have numerous colleagues in Computer Science and Applied Mathematics, and decent proximity to RPI, another nationally leading computational science (and engineering) campus, where we were also tempted to move.

The interdisciplinary nature of computational science and its dependence on large machines and complex software makes the critical mass that is often available only at a laboratory very desirable. Recognizing the value to their own programs of closer collaboration with the DOE laboratory complex, Columbia has agreed that I may continue to devote up to 50% of my time to DOE collaborations through teaching buy-outs. These are to be worked out with various laboratories and programs on a year-by-year basis. I do not expect to travel a full 50% of the academic year, since I will be teaching, but DOE programs will continue to be a focus of my technical activities. The laboratories will benefit from increased access to Columbia's top-flight students -- graduate and undergraduate. Last year, according to U.S. News and World Report, Harvard alone was more selective than Columbia, in admitting a smaller percentage of all (undergraduate) students who applied (11% versus Columbia's 12%).

It will be very difficult to leave Old Dominion University, where I have been based for nearly a decade, while also pursuing collaborations locally at ICASE (at NASA's Langley Research Center) and at DOE labs around the country. ODU is currently completing an 80,000-square foot Engineering and Computational Sciences building , with a wing reserved for the fledgling Center for Computational Science. My colleague Alex Pothen and I have proudly graduated five ODU students into full-time DOE laboratory computational science employment, keeping a sixth as our own post-doc, with others in progress, while bringing to campus five major federal projects (DOE ASCI (Level 2), DOE SciDAC, NSF Grand Challenge, NSF ITR, and U.S. Department of Education GAANN). It has been a period of career growth through personal technical diversification, pedagogical innovation, and valuable administrative experience. In a career as a student and faculty member that now finds me heading to an Ivy League school for the fourth time, my ODU experience has provided a solid appreciation for the strength and productivity of the public sector of American higher education. May the Monarch continue to roar upward from its entrance into the Top 100 public "Carnegie Doctoral/Research Universities-Extensive".

As much as we look forward to Columbia and New York City, we regret the opportunities left behind and the opportunities declined to make this choice. I look forward to adding new relationships and collaborations without completely retiring any of the current ones!

Yours sincerely,
David

Miscellaneous Columbia facts Founded 1754 (as King's College, sixth in the Colonies) 22,000 students across all schools 2,900 faculty 213,000 living alumni 58 Nobel Prize winners $500M annually in R&D $5B endowment (ninth largest in US)