Each year IACS awards its New Recruit Awards to “stellar,” new incoming graduate students who plan to undertake research related to computational science. The awards provide support, primarily in the forms of funding and mentorship, so that high-potential students can thrive in their studies at Stony Brook University.
Recently, IACS announced the recipients of the new recruit awards for Fall 2015. The two students, who will both be pursuing doctoral degrees, are Alex Borowicz and Dongwon (DW) Han. The award is in addition to their regular stipends provided by their home departments and raises their total payment to $32,000 for 1 calendar year, plus $4000 for travel and equipment. IACS awardees are permanently identified on the IACS website and in IACS publications, and their work will be highlighted in IACS workshop and conference proceedings.
Alex Borowicz
Accepted into the Ecology and Evolution PhD program, Borowicz will be working with IACS Affiliate Assistant Professor Heather Lynch. Borowicz said that he was “thrilled” to be offered the award, especially because it would afford him the opportunity to execute research projects incorporating computation, an area which he said is a bit outside of his typical research comfort zone. “I was trained in more of a natural history approach to ecology that emphasized observation and careful thought,” said Borowicz. “Obviously in order to produce meaningful results, ecology does need to be a quantitative science, so I’m really looking forward to bringing the natural history tradition into quantitative ecology that’s at the heart of Heather’s lab.”
Borowicz earned his BA in Human Ecology from College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine in 2014. Over the years he has amassed a great deal of hands-on experience in the field of wildlife science, working at the Wild Spirit Wolf Sanctuary in New Mexico and then in the Gulf of Maine studying seals and whales. At Stony Brook, he said he plans on studying the impacts of climate change on Antarctic organisms and ecosystems. Specifically Borowicz said that he seeks to study marine mammals and “seals in particular, to examine both the population dynamics of the several species in the region and the ways in which physical changes affect how they manage life in a challenging environment.”
DW Han
Accepted into the Physics and Astronomy PhD program, Han has yet to choose his IACS-affiliated mentor. “I have not decided my research topic, but I know that my research will involve analyzing large and complex data.”
Han moved to the United States from South Korea 10 years ago. He earned his BS in Mathematics, with minors in Computer Science and Physics, from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2013, and he has been working as a software developer in Waltham, Massachusetts since graduation. Han said that pursuing his doctorate at Stony Brook would provide him with a means of transitioning out of a job in industry to a research-based career in a national laboratory. Han said he believes that the same “big data” computing used by high-tech industry companies to better understand their ever-growing data sets “can be readily be applied to analysis of complex physical systems” in the fields of physics and astronomy, which are fields producing data that have historically been analyzed using statistics.
Receiving the award was humbling, said Han, adding that he is “thankful” for the support - financially and otherwise - afforded to him by the IACS New Recruit Award, which he said will help him facilitate his research and further his education.
For more information about the resources and opportunities available to students and faculty through the Institute for Advanced Computational Science, visit www.iacs@stonybrook.edu.
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