David A. Vargas, currently a UNM PhD student in applied mathematics, was recently announced as the recipient of the John von Neumann Postdoctoral Fellowship in Computational Science at Sandia National Laboratories.  David expects to graduate by Summer, 2024.  This is one of the most prestigious postdoctoral fellowships at Sandia, and in general for the field of computational science. 

David’s PhD work, under the advising of Associate Professor Jacob Schroder, has focused on parallel-in-time methods for chaotic dynamical systems and has led to the first known results of meaningful speedup in the time dimension for computational simulations of chaotic systems.  At Sandia, David plans to develop general and scalable parallel-in-time solvers for turbulent fluid dynamics based on nonlinear space-time multigrid methods and to apply algorithms developed during his dissertation work to accelerate weather and climate simulations.

David  received his BS in Applied Mathematics from UNM in Spring 2020, he received one of three Student Paper Award at the 2022 and at the 2023 Copper Mountain Conference on Iterative Methods. He was was awarded an Honorable Mention by the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program in Spring 2020.