Dr. Thomas F. Russell
Senior Technical Advisor
Dr. Thomas F. Russell joined BES as the Senior Technical Advisor in June 2015, providing expert scientific advice and detailed technical analyses to the BES Director and Division Directors for formulation, execution, and defense of the budget, as well as the evaluation of research programs, facility operations, and their associated resources to attain a planned course of action for the overall BES mission.
Dr. Russell came to BES after a varied career in industry, academia, and government. His scientific background is in applied and computational mathematics, particularly in numerical methods for the solution of partial differential equations, with a strong interest in applications to fluid flow and transport in the subsurface. His degrees are in mathematics, from Princeton University (A.B.) and the University of Chicago (Ph.D., 1980). From 1980 to 1987, Dr. Russell was a research mathematician at the Petroleum Technology Center of Marathon Oil Company in Littleton, CO, working with the reservoir simulation group on modeling of processes such as gas flow to a hydraulically fractured well and polymer-enhanced secondary oil recovery. He spent the next 16 years as associate professor, professor, and department chair in the mathematics department at the University of Colorado – Denver, expanding his interdisciplinary collaborations to environmental modeling of groundwater contamination and co-founding the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) Activity Group on Geosciences. Dr. Russell is the author or co-author of approximately 100 publications, and received the Researcher of the Year award from UC-Denver in 1996.In 2003,
Dr. Russell moved to the National Science Foundation as a program director in the Division of Mathematical Sciences (DMS). In his 12 years at NSF, he also served as Acting Deputy Division Director of DMS, staff associate in the front office of Mathematical and Physical Sciences (MPS), senior staff associate in the Office of Integrative Activities (OIA), and program director for high performance computing in the Division of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure (ACI). His NSF-wide leadership roles included co-chairing the Cyber-enabled Discovery and Innovation (CDI), Integrated NSF Support Promoting Interdisciplinary Research and Education (INSPIRE), and Cyberinfrastructure Framework for the 21st Century (CIF21) initiatives.
Contact Information:
Office of Basic Energy Sciences
SC-32/Germantown Building
U.S. Department of Energy
1000 Independence Avenue, SW
Washington, D.C. 20585-1290
Phone: (301) 903-1425
Fax: (301) 903-6594
thomas.russell@science.doe.gov
