John B. Bell

John B. Bell is an American mathematician and the head of the Center for Computational Sciences and Engineering at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He has made contributions in the areas of finite difference methods, numerical methods for low Mach number flows, adaptive mesh refinement, interface tracking and parallel computing. He has also worked on the application of these numerical methods to problems from a broad range of fields, including combustion, shock physics, seismology, flow in porous media and astrophysics.

Bell received his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1979. Following a three-year stint at the Naval Surface Weapons Center, he spent four years at Exxon Production Research, where he was the group leader of the Applied Mathematics Group in the Long Range Research Division. He worked at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory from 1986 until 1996, when he joined Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He is currently the head of the Center for Computational Sciences and Engineering in LBNL's Computational Research Department of the Computing Sciences Division. He was one of the founders and is the current managing editor of Communications in Applied Mathematics and Computational Science (CAMCOS).

Bell was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2012. He is also a Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM). He is the recipient of the Sidney Fernbach Award from the IEEE Computer Society in 2005, given each year to one person who has made "an outstanding contribution in the application of high performance computers using innovative approaches. He also received the SIAM/ACM prize (with Phil Colella) for computational science and engineering in 2003.