Prof David Keyes

Professor of Applied Mathematics and Computational Sciences, Computer Science, and Mechanical Engineering

David E. Keyes is Professor of Applied Mathematics and Computational Science, Computer Science, and Mechanical Engineering at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, where he also serves as Senior Associate to the President and as the university's delegate to the Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution Saudi Arabia. He was the founding dean of KAUST's Computer, Electrical and Mathematical Sciences and Engineering Division between 2009 and 2012, and directed its Extreme Computing Research Center from 2013 to 2024. He earned a BEng in Aerospace and Mechanical Sciences summa cum laude from Princeton in 1978, followed by an MS in 1979 and a PhD in 1984 in Applied Mathematics from Harvard, and held faculty positions at Yale, Old Dominion and Columbia, where he retains an adjunct professorship. His research sits at the algorithmic interface between parallel computing and the numerical analysis of partial differential equations, focused on scalable implicit solvers and preconditioning for large-scale energy and environmental applications, and he led multi-institutional scalable-solver software projects under the United States Department of Energy's SciDAC and ASCI programmes. His honours include two ACM Gordon Bell Prizes in 1999 and 2024, the 2020 Gauss Award for High Performance Computing, the IEEE Sidney Fernbach Award in 2007, the Euro-Par Career Achievement Award in 2018 and the SIAM Prize for Distinguished Service in 2011, and he is a fellow of SIAM, the American Mathematical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.