Professor Linda Petzold wins 2011 Faculty Research Lecture Award
The Faculty Research Lecturer is the highest honor that this university
bestows on the faculty. As the chair of the Faculty Research Lecturer
Award Committee, it is my great privilege and honor to announce that the
winner of this year’s Faculty Research Lecturer is Professor Linda
Petzold of the Department of Computer Science and the Department of
Mechanical Engineering.
Professor Petzold received her Bachelor of Science in Math and Computer
Science in 1974, and received her Ph.D in Computer Science with a
Mathematics minor at the University of Illinois in 1978. She worked at
Sandia National Laboratories and at Lawrence Livermore National
Laboratory, and taught at the University of Minnesota before she came to
UCSB as professor in Mechanical Engineering and Computer Science in
1997.
Professor Petzold has a superb record of research that has been
well-recognized for its creativity and impact. She was elected to the
National Academy of Engineering in 2004 “for advances in the numerical
solution of differential-algebraic equations and their incorporation
into widely distributed software.” She is a Fellow of the American
Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the Society for
Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), and the American Society of
Mechanical Engineers (ASME). She has received numerous prizes. She has
authored approximately 180 journal and conference publications and 2
widely-cited books, and has produced 2 major software packages.
Professor J. Tinsley Oden of the University of Texas states: “I can
truly say that Linda Petzold is one of the most highly regarded and
highly recognized computational scientists and computer scientists in
the world.” Professor J. C. Butcher of the University of Auckland, New
Zealand, also writes: “Her name is a household name amongst numerical
analysts throughout the world.”
Professor Petzold’s high level visibility and impact began with her
seminal article, “DAEs are not ODEs” which she published in 1981. Many
physical systems are naturally described as systems of
DAEs—differential-algebraic equations. These systems often consist of
differential equations coupled to nonlinear constraints. DAE systems
occur in the modeling of electrical networks and power systems, flow of
incompressible fluids, mechanical systems simulation and control,
chemical process simulation and control, and in many other applications.
These problems include systems that are, in many ways, quite different
from ordinary differential equations (ODEs).
In her article, Professor Petzold showed that for a large class of
problems there were serious difficulties with this approach and outlined
some future research areas. This article was ahead of its time, but
set out the agenda for this subject in a prophetic way. Since the
publication of this article, Professor Petzold, played a leading role in
the explosive growth of the new field of DAEs. Thus before she reached
the age of 30, she had established a new field and guided the field to
its maturation. This led to her major role in the development of DASSL, a
software package for which she won the Wilkinson Prize for Numerical
Software in 1991. This numerical solver for DAEs, and its successor,
DASPK, have been widely distributed and used successfully for solving a
large number of problems in science and engineering.
During the past decade, Professor Petzold undertook a new major research
direction: computational systems biology, and again established an
emerging discipline in its own right. In microscopic systems formed by
living cells, small numbers of reactant molecules can result in
dynamical behavior that is discreet and stochastic rather than
continuous and deterministic. In simulating and analyzing such behavior
it is essential to employ methods that directly take into account the
underlying discrete stochastic nature of the molecular events. This
leads to an accurate description of the system that in many important
cases is impossible to obtain through deterministic continuous modeling
such as ODEs.
Before Professor Petzold became involved in this area of research, there
had existed Gillespie’s Stochastic Simulation Algorithms (SSA) to treat
these problems, but as a procedure, it was prohibitively inefficient
for most realistic problems. Professor Petzold and her group, working
closely with Gillespie, succeeded in developing a multiscale
computational framework for numerical simulation of chemically reacting
systems, where each reaction will be treated at the appropriate scale.
Professor Petzold and Dr. Gillespie have co-authored several landmark
papers on multiscale simulation for discrete stochastic systems.
Professor Petzold’s research group developed the StochKit package for
multiscale discrete stochastic simulations.
From this, Professor Petzold then moved into a third important field.
She is currently actively involved in collaborative efforts in systems
biology to obtain a better understanding of the biochemical processes
including the gene regulatory network underlying Circadian Rhythms in
neurons, Cell Polarization in Yeast Mating, Unfolded Protein Response in
yeast, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Coagulopathy, and Diabetes Type
2. As you can see from this list, the practical application of her
research is enormous.
Professor Petzold has served on numerous boards and panels of the
National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, and other federal
agencies. She was Editor-in-Chief of SIAM Journal of Scientific
Computing, served on the SIAM Council, and has been active in the
organization and promotion of the Society of Industrial and Applied
Mathematics, as well as the American Association for Mechanical
Engineers. She gave numerous lectures, the list of which fills 16 pages
(single-spaced) of her CV.
Throughout her career, she has closely interacted with physical
scientists and engineers. This has enabled her to identify strategic
next-generation problems for which solution are urgently sought. These
include a wide variety of applications in biology, nanotechnology,
materials, mechanical engineering, computational chemistry and chemical
engineering. Summing up Professor Petzold’s achievements in research,
Professor Richard Alkire of the University of Illinois writes: “There
are few people in the world that can compare with Petzold’s unique
ability to formulate software advances that contribute so clearly to a
broad menu of science and engineering problems…. While some colleagues
in her field took over well-established programs of long-standing,
Petzold has by contrast forged a pioneering position that is hers
alone.”
Professor Petzold is also very active in education and outreach. She
directs the UCSB Institute for Biotechnologies SABRE summer research
internship program for students from Historically Black Colleges and
Universities and Minority Institutions, and serves on the Chancellor’s
Outreach Advisory Board. She is also a highly-visible role model for
women students in the scientific community, and is often called upon to
speak to groups of women and minority students who may be interested in
pursuing a career in engineering or science. But, as one letter writer
states, “she is more than that. She is a role model for anyone with
similar aspirations.”
Professor Petzold is also an outstanding colleague and has worked
tirelessly on behalf of both the scientific community and UCSB. She
served as the Chair of the Department of Computer Science from
2003-2007. She established and now chairs the Graduate Emphasis in
Computational Science and Engineering across 7 departments in both
science and engineering.
It is thus with a great sense of honor and pleasure that I announce that
the highest honor that UCSB bestows on its faculty—the Faculty Research
Lecturer—is awarded to Professor Linda Petzold.
Faculty Research Lecturer Award Committee
• Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, Chair
• David Awschalom
• Howard Giles
• William Murdoch
