SCI Director Dr. Chris Johnson has been selected by the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) to be honored as a SIAM Fellow for his contributions to Scientific Computing and Visualization. The SIAM Fellow is a new honor designed to recognize a member's outstanding contributions to the fields served by SIAM. Dr. Johnson is among the initial class to be selected for this honor. Initial Fellows were selected from among those SIAM members for which certain previous recognition places them clearly among those intended to be recognized by the program. For more information see: SIAM Fellows Program.
The NIH Center for Integrative Biomedical Computing (CIBC) and the Scientific Computing and Imaging (SCI) Institute would like to join the international scientific community in extending our heartiest congratulations to our University of Utah colleague Dr. Mario Capecchi as one of the three recipients of the 2007 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. This award recognizes the ground-breaking work of Dr. Capecchi and his scientific contemporaries, Dr. Oliver Smithies of Cardiff University in the UK and Dr. Martin Evans of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, in the development of genetic targeting of embryonic stem cells in mice. This novel technique selectively alters individual genes in the mouse DNA. Through studies employing genetic targeting, medical researchers now can better elucidate the roles that particular genes play in the animal development. The application of this method has revolutionized the study of mammalian biology and contributed to the development of new animal models for numerous human diseases in addition to cancers occurring in mice.
Chris Johnson, a distinguished professor of computer science and director of the Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute, has been elected by his peers as a fellow in the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Johnson is one of 376 AAAS members who were given the distinction this year "because of their efforts toward advancing science applications that are deemed scientifically or socially distinguished," the group says. Johnson specifically was cited "for distinguished contributions to scientific computing and scientific visualization." The AAAS, founded in 1848, is the world's largest general scientific society and publisher of the journal Science, which has an estimated total readership of 1 million.
SCI Institute Director Chris Johnson was recently promoted to the rank of Distinguished Professor of Computer Science. Professor Johnson's research through the years has focused on biomedical computing, visualization, inverse problems and problem solving environments. It is his continuing goal to use his work in scientific computing to create new techniques, tools, and systems, to solve problems affecting various aspects of human life.