Post Doc Matthews garners second national award

Devin Matthews, a postdoctoral researcher with ICES Professors Robert van de Geijn and John Stanton, has been selected as an inaugural recipient of the 2015 Arnold O. Beckman Postdoctoral Fellows Award.

The annual award supports postdoctoral fellows "who are judged to have the highest potential for success in a career in chemistry and the life sciences, and who will become the next generation of leaders and innovators in science, engineering, and technology."

"We hope this award will be the catalyst to help with your transition to an outstanding, independent research career," said Anne Hultgren, executive director of the foundation.

The Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation designed the awards to promote research in chemistry and the life sciences, broadly interpreted, and particularly to foster the invention of methods, instruments, and materials that will open up new avenues of research in science.

The three-year, annually renewable grant offers more than $175,000 in support for Matthews' research on efficient implementations and interfaces for tensor operations in quantum chemistry.

As an undergraduate, The University of Texas at Austin chose Matthews as their Beckman Scholar, and he published four papers during that time. He continued at UT and earned his 2014 Ph.D. in chemistry from studying under Stanton. The computer code resulting from his Ph.D. work is already being widely used nationally and internationally.

"There are few postdoctoral scholars worldwide with the breadth of skills that are at the command of Dr. Matthews," said Ruth Shear, a member of the UT Department of Chemistry faculty who nominated Matthews for the award. "He is truly interdisciplinary: there are people in chemistry, people in physics and people in computer science who are all deeply impressed with him, and he moves easily between the fields with a skillset that seems totally incongruent with his young age."

Last month Matthews was also named recipient of the 2015 Frederick A. Howes Scholar in Computational Science for the U.S. Department of Energy.