Professor Michael T. Heath

Engineering at Illinois Engineering at Illinois

Biography

Michael T. Heath is Professor and Fulton Watson Copp Chair Emeritus in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He received a B.A. in Mathematics from the University of Kentucky, an M.S. in Mathematics from the University of Tennessee, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University. Before joining the University of Illinois in 1991, he spent a number of years at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, first as Eugene P. Wigner Postdoctoral Fellow and later as Computer Science Group Leader in the Computer Science and Mathematics Division. At Illinois, he served as Director of the Computational Science and Engineering Program 1996-2012, Director of the Center for Simulation of Advanced Rockets 1997-2010, and Interim Head of the Department of Computer Science 2007-2009.

Heath's research interests are in scientific computing, particularly numerical linear algebra and optimization, and in parallel computing. He has been an editor of the SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing, SIAM Review, and the International Journal of High Performance Computing Applications, as well as several conference proceedings. He is also author of the widely adopted textbook Scientific Computing: An Introductory Survey, revised 2nd ed., published by SIAM in 2018.

At the University of Illinois, Heath has been lead investigator on more than $52M in research funding from federal and corporate grants and contracts. His major awards include being named an ACM Fellow by the Association for Computing Machinery in 2000, membership in the European Academy of Sciences in 2002, the Apple Award for Innovation in Science in 2007, the Taylor L. Booth Education Award from the IEEE Computer Society in 2009, and being named a SIAM Fellow by the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics and an Associate Fellow by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, both in 2010.

CV: pdf

Mathematics Genealogy Web Page

Academic Family Tree

Memorial Tribute to My PhD Advisor, Gene Golub