James R. McCombs ('07) Receives Distinguished Dissertation Award
James R. McCombs received the 2006/07 W&M Arts and Science Distinguished Dissertation Award in the Natural and Computational Sciences.
He defended his Ph.D. in April 2007 under the direction of Prof. Stathopoulos. Dr. McCombs worked on producing robust methods, parallel techniques, and software for the ultimate symmetric eigenvalue solver. The problem is in the heart of almost every major engineering computation: materials science, structural engineering, lattice QCD, stability analysis, data mining (Google\'s PageRank algorithm). Besides several top publications, he also co-authored the state-of-the-art software package PRIMME.
