What is computational science? Computational science is an area of study centered on applying techniques for computing and managing data to research in many disciplines. Computational science at Stony Brook University involves many scientists from different backgrounds undertaking research in diverse fields. Here at the Institute for Advanced Computational Science, We bring together faculty and students from different backgrounds and research areas to collaborate, intermingle, and share resources and ideas. Our scientists who use the computer clusters available through our institute to simulate phenomena that would otherwise be cost prohibitive or just not possible to experimentally study.
A good example is blowing up stars in tremendous explosions known as supernovae to better understand the lives of stars and the creation of elements that will go on to become new stars and planets. When I work with a student, typically what I'll do is get the student working with an existing computer code to implement and model some astrophysical problem, like say a supernova. We try for a particular problem to confront the observations, and that means meeting with observers and reading papers and things like that. Some scientists use the computer clusters to analyze vast amounts of data, like studying tweets and Facebook entries to make predictive models of human society, or studying the recorded movements of Antarctic penguins to gauge their response to climate change.
We spend about six months a year in the Antarctic trudging around, counting penguins and seals and other wildlife. But back at home we have to figure out what it all means and this brings us into the realm of sophisticated models and high-performance computing and satellite imagery and so we're very much working both sides of that problem both on the ground traditional ecological field work but also data science and modeling and applied math. The aim of our Institute is to bring these faculty and students together to benefit from shared best practices, to collaborate on multidisciplinary projects. and to have collegial interactions that inevitably result in new ideas for research. We organize a computational neuroscience journal club that is a very multidisciplinary journal club.
Many different departments, from undergrad to postdocs to different faculty come to our journal club. And it was hosted by ICS. We meet weekly.
And the diversity of ideas and backgrounds really help us ground our thinking. And... You know, get new ideas.
It really promotes new ideas. In the Institute of Advanced Computational Science, I am the president of the student association. So we have a grad student group and we try to organize events for our fellow grad students and increase the communication because one of the features of IEA is that it's multidisciplinary.
The members spread among different buildings, different sides of campus, and in some cases different countries. We offer many incentive opportunities for our graduate students, like our $500 writing award for a student's first publication, our $2,000 travel award for students presenting at conferences, or our junior researcher awards for stellar students who are making notable advances in their research. In addition, we give graduate students opportunities to teach during our IACS computes high school summer camp, and we offer internships at local and national sites ranging from Brookhaven National Laboratory to IBM to NOAA. We also offer undergraduates from around the country a chance to come to Stony Brook University during the summer to experience research with an Institute faculty member during our Data Plus Computing Equal Discovery REU camp.
I'm working with Long Tao. It's a senior graduate student which is helping me on my project. This is from China. I have never expected in my life that I will be working with someone from there.
Very interesting to collaborate with people who are outside of your field. I think in the past it was easy to stay in one field and continue to get answers, but now, especially in terms of computational science, you have to interact with mathematicians and computer scientists and all these other fields just to get answers because there's so much information out there, you can't be an expert on everything. We encourage an entrepreneurial think tank culture.
Which results in people making connections that elevate their careers and electrify their curiosity. Come join us and be part of the new phase of research at the Institute for Advanced Computational Science at Stony Brook University.