Staff Directory

Email:  trussell@nsf.gov Phone: (703) 292-4863 Fax: (703) 292-9040 Room: 1285 N Organization:  OIA Title:  Senior Staff Associate Website: http://www-math.cudenver.edu/~trussell Resume: Resume

Thomas F. Russell joined OIA in November 2008 to coordinate the planning and execution of NSF's Cyber-Enabled Discovery and Innovation (CDI) program and, drawing upon his insight gained from his CDI experience, to formulate best practices regarding the design and implementation of NSF-wide, interdisciplinary programs.

Dr. Russell comes to OIA from the NSF Division of Mathematical Sciences (DMS), where he has served as a program director for computational mathematics and applied mathematics since 2003.  His integrative activities during his years at NSF include leading or participating in the following initiatives:  the DMS Vertical Integration of Research and Education (2005-2007); the DMS-GEO Collaborations in Mathematical Geosciences (2003-present); the Interagency Modeling and Analysis Group, which supports modeling and analysis of biomedical systems (2004-present); and the NSF-wide, CDI initiative (2007-present).

Previously, Dr. Russell was a professor in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Colorado at Denver from 1987 to 2003, and served as department chair from 1996 to 2001.  From 1980 to 1987, he was a research mathematician at the Petroleum Technology Center of Marathon Oil Company in Littleton, CO.  He received his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Chicago in 1980 under the supervision of Jim Douglas, Jr.  His interdisciplinary professional service includes a term as the chair of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) Activity Group on Geosciences from 1998 to 2000, chair of the organizing committee for the 2001 SIAM Conference on Geosciences, associate editor of Water Resources Research from 2001 to 2004, and membership on the scientific council of the French Research Group for Numerical Simulation and Mathematical Modeling of Underground Nuclear Waste Disposal since 2002.

His research interests are in the numerical solution of partial differential equations, particularly with applications to subsurface flows in porous media, including groundwater flow and transport and petroleum reservoir simulation.  His current major thrusts include control-volume mixed finite element methods, which compute accurate velocities/fluxes for flow equations in heterogeneous media on distorted meshes; Eulerian-Lagrangian localized adjoint methods, which compute accurate solutions for transport equations, even when advection-dominated; efficient algebraic equation solvers for these methods; and upscaling techniques based on stochastic models and the solution of moment equations.