Robert J. Harrison

Prof. Robert J. Harrison is a theoretical chemist and expert in high-performance computing. He is a professor in the Applied Mathematics and Statistics department and founding Director of the Institute for Advanced Computational Science (IACS) at Stony Brook University. Dr. Harrison went to Stony Brook, initially with joint appointment to Brookhaven National Laboratory, from the University of Tennessee and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where he was Director of the Joint Institute of Computational Science (JICS), Professor of Chemistry and Corporate Fellow. His research interests focus on accurate calculations on large systems and heavy elements using advanced numerical and computational techniques.

His undergraduate and post-graduate degrees were obtained at Cambridge University, England. Subsequently, he worked as a postdoctoral research fellow at the Quantum Theory Project, University of Florida, and the Daresbury Laboratory, England, joining the staff of the theoretical chemistry group at Argonne National Laboratory in 1988. In 1992, he moved to the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, leading the development of NWChem, a computational chemistry code for massively parallel computers. In August 2002, he started the joint faculty appointment with UT/ORNL, and became director of JICS in 2011. He received the 2002 IEEE Computer Society Sidney Fernbach Award, his work on NWChem and MADNESS has been recognized by R&D Magazine R&D100 awards in 1999 and 2011. In 2015-2016, Dr. Harrison co-chaired with Bill Gropp the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine committee on Future Directions for NSF Advanced Computing Infrastructure to Support U.S. Science in 2017-2020.