David Keyes is a professor of Applied Mathematics and Computational Science, Computer Science, and Mechanical Engineering at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST). He was the founding Dean of the Division of Mathematical and Computer Sciences and Engineering from 2009 to 2012, the Director of the Extreme Computing Research Center from 2013 to 2024, and Senior Associate to the President from 2018 to 2024. Keyes is also an Adjunct Professor and the former Fu Foundation Chair Professor in Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics at Columbia University and a faculty affiliate of several laboratories of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). He graduated summa cum laude in Aerospace and Mechanical Sciences with a certificate in Engineering Physics from Princeton in 1978 and earned a doctorate in Applied Mathematics from Harvard in 1984.
Keyes works at the algorithmic interface between parallel computing and the numerical analysis of partial differential equations (PDEs), spatial statistics, and machine learning. He focuses on scalable solvers that exploit hierarchy and data sparsity, targeting power-austere emerging architectures. He collaborates on large-scale applications in energy and environment that demand high performance because of resolution, dimension, high fidelity physical models, or the “multi-solve” requirements of optimization, control, sensitivity analysis, inverse problems, data assimilation, or uncertainty quantification. To support such missions, he co-created and popularized the Newton-Krylov-Schwarz (NKS, 1994), pseudo-transient continuation (ψTC, 1998), Additive Schwarz Preconditioned Inexact Newton (ASPIN, 2002), and Hierarchical Basis Multigrid (H2-MG, 2025) methods, and the Hierarchical Computations on Manycore Architectures (HiCMA, 2014) dense solver framework.
Keyes was awarded an NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award as an Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Yale University in 1989. For his algorithmic influence in scientific simulation, Keyes has been recognized as a Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society (AMS), and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). He received the Gordon Bell Prize of the ACM in 1999 and the Gordon Bell Prize for Climate Modeling in 2024 and has been a finalist for Gordon Bell Prizes (one of six globally) on three other occasions. He received the Sidney Fernbach Award of the IEEE Computer Society in 2007. The Euro-Par conference honored him with their Career Award in 2018 and he shared the German Gauss Center for Supercomputing with its 2020 GCS Award. (Co-)author or (co-)editor of more twenty U.S. federal or Saudi agency reports and member of several U.S. federal advisory committees on computational science and engineering and high performance computing, in 2011 Keyes received the SIAM Prize for Distinguished Service to the Profession and in 2025 the IEEE TCPP Outstanding Service and Contributions Award. He has received teaching prizes from Harvard, Yale, and Columbia Universities. In 2024, in the 35th anniversary edition of the HPCWire newsletter, Keyes was named one of the inaugural 35 “legends” of High Performance Computing (HPC).