CIS Professor Hank Childs awarded UO Early Career Research Excellence Award for 2015
The CIS Department congratulates Assistant Professor Hank Childs for receiving the University of Oregon's Early Career Research Excellence Award, which is the highest university award for early career faculty. Prof. Childs was one of only two recipients across campus. Award selection was based on scholarship and research.
Prof. Childs is a highly active researcher, authoring over 70 papers on scientific visualization, on high performance computing, and at the intersection of the two. Since joining UO in March of 2013, his research group, CDUX has grown to support seven Ph.D. students and two undergraduate students. CDUX has attracted funding from the Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, and private industry. This funding includes a prestigious Department of Energy Early Career Award, to research issues at the intersection of visualization and exascale computing (i.e., supercomputers that are approximately 100 to 1,000 times more capable than those of today).
Prof. Childs has experienced significant research success during his time at UO. In November of 2014, he advised the work that won Best Paper at the IEEE Large Data Visualization and Analysis Symposium in Paris. In February of 2015, his joint work with CDUX Ph.D. student Shaomeng Li and other researchers received one of the Best Papers at the SPIE Conference on Visualization and Data Analysis in San Francisco. Overall, Prof. Childs has received a total of five Best Paper awards.
Prof. Childs’ prior experience also focused on research in Big Data visualization. He joined Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 1999, and worked there full-time until 2009. He also completed a Ph.D. at the University of California at Davis in 2006. In 2009, Prof. Childs moved to a joint position between the Visualization Group at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the Institute for Data Analysis and Visualization at UC Davis. Prof. Childs still maintains his role at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where he actively collaborates with researchers there and across the Department of Energy.
Outside of his research, Prof. Childs is best known for his involvement with the R&D100 award-winning VisIt software. VisIt has had a large impact on the high-performance computing community, including hundreds of thousands of downloads and usage on supercomputers worldwide. It is primarily used to study simulation data, with sources coming from astrophysics, combustion, climate, engineering, nuclear reactors, fusion, and ocean modeling simulations, among others.