Alex Pothen

Alex Pothen is an Indian-born American computer scientist and applied mathematician who is a professor at Purdue University. His research primarily focuses on combinatorial scientific computing (CSC), graph algorithms, parallel computing, and bioinformatics algorithms.

Pothen was born in Munnar, Kerala, India.

Education
Pothen completed his M.S. Degree in Chemistry at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi in 1978 and earned a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science from Cornell University in 1984.

Career
Pothen held the position of Director at the Institute for Combinatorial Scientific Computing and Petascale Simulations (CSCAPES), which received funding from the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy between 2006 and 2012. Additionally, Pothen was part of the ExaGraph center, funded by the Exascale Computing Project, a joint venture of the DOE and NNSA. He is recognized as the inaugural Chair of the Activity Group on Applied and Computational Discrete Algorithms under SIAM.

Currently, Pothen is an editor of the Journal of the ACM, SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing, and Optimization Methods and Software.

Honors

 * Received Distinguished Alumni Award from IIT Delhi in 2009.
 * Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) in 2018
 * Awarded the George Pólya Prize in Applied Combinatorics in 2021 by Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics.
 * Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in 2022
 * Fellow of the American Mathematical Society (AMS) in 2024