Jack Dongarra has played an influential role in the field of high-performance computing. Credit: Genevieve Martin/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy
Computing pioneer Jack Dongarra has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences in recognition of his distinguished and continuing achievements in original research.
Dongarra is an R&D staff member in Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Computer Science and Mathematics Division and professor emeritus at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where he recently retired as founding director of UT’s Innovative Computing Laboratory.
In 2022, Dongarra was a recipient of the A.M. Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery, recognizing his innovative contributions to numerical algorithms and libraries that enabled high-performance computational software to keep pace with exponential hardware improvements for over four decades.
"Throughout his career, Jack has made contributions that have forever altered the computing community and multiple institutions, including ORNL," said Jeff Smith, ORNL interim director. "This is an incredible, well-deserved achievement, and we are proud to call Jack one of our own."
Dongarra joins a select group of ORNL researchers who have been elected to the National Academy of Sciences, which is a private, nonprofit institution established under a congressional charter signed by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863. It recognizes achievement in science by election to membership, and—with the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Medicine—provides science, engineering, and health policy advice to the federal government and other organizations.
Along with his positions at ORNL and UT, he has served as a Turing Fellow at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom since 2007. Dongarra earned a bachelor’s in mathematics from Chicago State University, a master’s in computer science from the Illinois Institute of Technology and a doctorate in applied mathematics from the University of New Mexico.
Dongarra is a fellow of ACM, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the International Supercomputing Conference, and the International Engineering and Technology Institute, plus he has garnered multiple honors from these organizations. He is also a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a foreign member of the British Royal Society.
UT-Battelle manages Oak Ridge National Laboratory for DOE’s Office of Science, the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States. DOE’s Office of Science is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit energy.gov/science.
