Argonne researcher wins prestigious Presidential award
Presented at the White House today
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ARGONNE, Ill. (July 26, 2006) — Todd Munson, a computational scientist at
the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory, is at the White
House today receiving a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and
Engineers.
These awards are the highest honor the U.S. government bestows on outstanding
scientists and engineers beginning their independent careers. This year, 56
researchers supported by nine federal departments and agencies received awards.
Munson is one of seven recipients affiliated with the U.S. Department of Energy.
The winners each received a citation, a plaque and a commitment for continued
funding of their work from their agency for five years.
“All of us here at the Energy Department are very pleased that these individuals
are being recognized by the president for the intellectual rigor, relevance
and high technical standards of their work,” Secretary of Energy Samuel W.
Bodman said. “We are proud to honor these seven awardees as a means of encouraging
promising young scientists and engineers to pursue work in areas of importance
to the Department of Energy's energy research and national security missions.”
“The federal government's continued support to these young scientists shows
the high regard in which their work is held,” said Argonne Director Robert
Rosner. “I'm proud that, once again, Argonne science is recognized in this
way. I congratulate Todd on this success and look forward to his great work
in the years to come.”
Munson is a member of Argonne's Mathematics and Computer Science Division,
where he has made significant contributions in the areas of large-scale continuous
optimization and nonlinear complementarity problems. These problems represent
situations where maximizing a desired goal must be done with regard to other
constraints; an example would be designing reloading operations for nuclear
reactors that give the highest power output possible while still observing
appropriate safety measures.
Munson is a lead developer of PATH, the most widely used code for solving
complementarity problems; the Network Enabled Optimization System (NEOS), a
collaboration between Argonne and Northwestern University that provides access
to optimization packages through a variety of Internet interfaces; and the
Toolkit for Advanced Optimization (TAO), an open source collection of parallel
algorithms for solving large-scale nonlinear optimization problems.
Munson has mentored graduate and undergraduate students through the DOE/NSF
Faculty and Student Team Program and Argonne's Summer Student Program; has
served on the organizing committee for the Argonne-University of Chicago Institute
on Computational Economics and given tutorials on numerical optimization to
the workshop participants; and has acted as a moderator and scientific judge
for the Chicago Regional Middle School Science Bowl.
Argonne National Laboratory seeks solutions to pressing national problems in science and technology.
The nation's first national laboratory, Argonne conducts leading-edge basic
and applied scientific research in virtually every scientific discipline. Argonne
researchers work closely with researchers from hundreds of companies, universities,
and federal, state and municipal agencies to help them solve their specific
problems, advance America 's scientific leadership and prepare the nation for
a better future. With employees from more than 60 nations, Argonne is managed
by UChicago
Argonne, LLC for
the U.S.
Department of Energy's Office
of Science.
For more information, please
contact Eva Sylwester (630/252-5549 or esylwester@anl.gov)
at Argonne.
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