Paul Fischer, UIUC Paul Fischer is a Blue Waters Professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in the departments of Computer Science and Mechanical Science & Engineering, and part-time senior scientist in the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at Argonne National Laboratory. He holds degrees in mechanical engineering from Cornell (BS), Stanford (MS) and MIT (PhD) and was a post-doctoral fellow in applied mathematics at Caltech. Fischer’s work on high-order numerical methods for partial differential equations, scalable linear solvers, and high-performance computing has been recognized with the Gordon Bell Prize in high-performance computing. He is the chief architect of the open source thermal fluids software, Nek5000, which has scaled beyond a million processes and which is currently used by hundreds of researchers for a variety of applications in turbulence and heat transfer.