David Alber

Academic Background

This is ancient history now, but it is part of my origin story.

Pre-Doctoral

I completed my Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in May 2007. I specialized in scientific computing and am particularly interested in algorithm and data structure design and development. My dissertation, titled Efficient Setup Algorithms for Parallel Algebraic Multigrid, focused on parallel coarse grid selection algorithms for algebraic multigrid (AMG) and was conducted under the guidance of my advisors Luke Olson and Paul Saylor.

I earned a M.S. in Computer Science at UIUC in 2004 under the guidance of Paul Saylor. My Masters research was influenced heavily by the work I did in my first summer at the Center for Applied Scientific Computing at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Further back, I earned a B.S. in Biological Science and Computer Science at the University of Iowa.

Post-Doctoral

Shortly after completing my Ph.D., I started a postdoctoral position in the Scientific Computing Center (now the Computational Science Center) at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in Golden, Colorado.

My primary project at NREL was part of a computational systems biology project called “Green Energy: Advancing Bio-hydrogen”. Briefly, the project aimed to: (1) construct a comprehensive metabolic model for the hydrogen-producing green alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii; (2) produce high-performance software for solving problems arising from the rate equations encoded in the model.

After NREL, I worked at Microsoft. Initially, my role there was to research topics in numerical linear algebra and other areas of scientific computing with the goal of producing a high-performance numerical library targeted at exploiting systems with large numbers of processing cores.

Publications