Lin Lin, an associate professor in the UC Berkeley mathematics department and a Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, or Berkeley Lab, scientist and mathematician, won the Simons Investigator in Mathematics award.
The Simons Foundation supports different methods of scientific research in order to better understand world phenomena, according to the foundation’s website. It does this through bestowing grants to investigators and funding projects.
According to a Berkeley Lab article, the individual given the Simons Foundation award receives research support of $100,000 per year. An additional $10,000 per year is given to the investigator’s department while 20% in indirect costs is given to the individual’s institution.
According to Yuri Tschinkel, director of mathematics and physical sciences at the Simons Foundation, distinguished experts noticed Lin’s exceptional research accomplishments and recommended him for the award.
James Sethian, head of the mathematics group at Berkeley Lab and director of Berkeley Lab’s CAMERA Center, contributed to the nomination of Lin for the Simons Foundation award, the Berkeley Lab article noted.
“Lin has established himself as a major force in the mathematical formulation and algorithmic development of electronic structure methods across multiple applications,” Sethian said in the Berkeley Lab article. “By inventing and bringing a wide spectrum of new mathematics to computational materials, Lin is blazing new paths in difficult and important problems.”
As specified in the Simons Foundation website, Lin has “developed efficient, accurate and scalable algorithms in Kohn-Sham density functional theory, localization theory, many-body perturbation theory and quantum embedding theory.”
More recently, Lin has worked on neural network-based methods to accelerate molecular simulations and quantum algorithms to solve high-dimensional linear algebraic problems.
“The support of the Simons Foundation will be of great help to the fundamental research my group is pursuing,” Lin said in an email.
