David Keyes is Professor of Applied Mathematics and Computational Science and the Director of the Extreme Computing Research Center at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), having served as the founding Dean of the Division of Mathematical and Computer Sciences and Engineering from 2009 to 2012. He joined the Office of President Tony Chan in October 2018 as Senior Associate, with responsibilities for strategic priorities and institutional partnerships. At KAUST, he is also an affiliate faculty member in Computer Science and Mechanical Engineering. Keyes retains an Adjunct Professorship as the former Fu Foundation Chair Professor in Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics at Columbia University and is a faculty affiliate of several laboratories of the U.S. Department of Energy. He graduated summa cum laude in Aerospace and Mechanical Sciences with a certificate in Engineering Physics from Princeton in 1978 and earned a doctorate in Applied Mathematics from Harvard in 1984.

Keyes works at the algorithmic interface between parallel computing and the numerical analysis of partial differential equations (PDEs) and statistics, with a focus on scalable solvers exploiting hierarchy and data sparsity for power-austere emerging architectures and their use in the many large-scale applications in energy and environment that demand high performance because of resolution, dimension, high fidelity physical models, or the “multi-solve” requirements of optimization, control, sensitivity analysis, inverse problems, data assimilation, or uncertainty quantification. Newton-Krylov-Schwarz (NKS, 1994) and Additive Schwarz Preconditioned Inexact Newton (ASPIN, 2002) are methods he co-created and popularized. 

Keyes was awarded an NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award as an Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Yale University in 1989. For his algorithmic influence in scientific simulation, Keyes has been recognized as a Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society (AMS), and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). He shared the Gordon Bell Prize of the ACM in 1999. He received the Sidney Fernbach Award of the IEEE Computer Society in 2007. Author or editor of more than a dozen U.S. federal agency reports and member of several federal advisory committees on computational science and engineering and high performance computing, in 2011, Keyes received the SIAM Prize for Distinguished Service to the Profession