Berkeley Lab Seeking Applicants for Post-Doctoral Fellowship in Computational Science

Contact: Jon Bashor, 510-486-5849 or JBashor@lbl.gov

January 6, 2003

BERKELEY, Calif. — The U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory is now accepting applications for the Luis W. Alvarez Post-Doctoral Fellowship in Computational Science. The deadline for applications for the coming academic year is Monday, March 3, 2003.

The fellowship, sponsored by the Computational Research Division and the National Energy Research Scientific Computing (NERSC) Center Division at Berkeley Lab, 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 one-year term appointment with the possibility of a one-year renewal. The successful applicant will be compensated with a competitive salary and excellent benefits. Additionally, the successful candidate will have access to the NERSC Center'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/projects/alvarez/.

Applications are due by March 3, 2003, 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 AlvarezFellowship@lbl.gov or by standard mail to:

Luis W. Alvarez Postdoctoral Fellowship
Job #ZFPA
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, 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, 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, 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 Alvarez receiving the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1968.

NERSC, which is located at Berkeley Lab, is the Department of Energy's flagship facility for unclassified computing, providing researchers across the country with some of the world's most powerful supercomputers. The Computational Research Division creates computational tools and techniques that enable scientific breakthroughs, by conducting applied research and development in computer science, computational science, and applied mathematics.

"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 Horst Simon, director of the Computational Research and NERSC Center divisions. "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 www.lbl.gov/CS/Careers.

Berkeley Lab (www.lbl.gov) conducts unclassified research and is managed by the University of California for the U.S. Department of Energy.