WOLFRAM

Wolfram Innovator Award

Wolfram technologies have long been a major force in many areas of industry and research. Leaders in many top organizations and institutions have played a major role in using computational intelligence and pushing the boundaries of how the Wolfram technology stack is leveraged for innovation across fields and disciplines.

We recognize these deserving recipients with the Wolfram Innovator Award, which is awarded at the Wolfram Technology Conferences around the world.

Presented at the Wolfram Technology Conferences. Learn more

2024

Europa Clipper Technical Resources Modeling Team

Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Areas: Aerospace, Computational Physics, Data Analysis, Data Analytics, Engineering, System Modeling, Systems Engineering

David Wagner, Andres Rivera, Emma Dodd, Narek Shougarian, David Coren and Reidar Larsen, members of the Europa Clipper project system engineering team at Jet Propulsion Laboratory (California Institute of Technology), used Wolfram Language and System Modeler as part of a large multiphysics simulation system used to validate requirements against performance of the design of the spacecraft intended to probe subsurface water on Jupiter’s moon Europa. Analysis provided by these models enabled the project to zero in on a workable design for an extremely complex mission and validate that it could achieve the mission’s aggressive requirements. The models continue to be used to validate mission plan updates into operations.

2021

Dr. Carol Johnstone

Senior Scientist, Particle Accelerator Corporation

Areas: Applied Mathematics, Biomedical Research, Computational Physics, Computer Science, Data Science, Mathematical Biology, Optimization, Physics

Dr. Johnstone is an internationally recognized senior accelerator physicist at Fermilab and Particle Accelerator Corporation. Her work was initially created to solve a simple set of approximate, thin lens optics equations simultaneously with geometric orbit equations. These constraint equations provided physical and field parameters that insured stable machine performance in novel accelerators for high energy physics research, such as the muon collider or Neutrino Factory. Her work evolved into a powerful new methodology for advanced accelerator design and optimization, which has since been applied to innovations in accelerators for radioisotope production, cancer therapy, security and cargo scanning, radiopharmaceuticals and green energy production. Dr. Johnstone’s efforts have resulted in the creation of a now-patented design for a non-scaling fixed-field gradient accelerator. Her work has also helped lead to the now-under-construction National Center for Particle Beam Therapy and Research in Texas, which will be the most advanced cancer therapy center in the US.

2021

Bruno Autin

President, Les Trois Platanes

Areas: Authoring and Publishing, Computational Physics, Physics, Software Development

Bruno Autin started his professional life in the Laboratoire de Recherches Générales de la Compagnie Française Thomson Houston, where he studied the amplification of acoustic microwaves in cadmium sulfide. He strove to replace classical traveling wave tubes by tiny crystals, the scaling factor being the ratio between sound and light velocities. In 1967, he began working at the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN), where his research turned quickly towards subnuclear physics with the development of very-high-energy accelerators. Bruno started with the first proton collider, the Intersection Storage Rings (ISR), and became introduced to the design and operation of the magnetic systems of accelerators and colliders. The basic theory had been established by Ernest Courant, but matching the architecture of colliders to particle detectors was largely a process of trial and error depending on numerical computations. Finding this to be unsatisfactory, he started testing symbolic languages. The first achievement was the shape of the CERN antiproton source calculated with Veltman’s Schoonschip. The saga of the antiprotons continued both at CERN and at Fermilab. Then, during a sabbatical year at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where he worked on the design of the Advanced Synchrotron Light Source, he tested the first release of Mathematica, which was packed with the NeXT computer. Having symbolics, numerics, graphics and the notebook interface convinced him to build two packages: Geometrica for geometry and BeamOptics for the investigation of optical systems adapted to projects such as beam emittance optimization for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), muon colliders, neutrino factories and medical synchrotrons. Now retired from CERN, he follows the progress of particle physics and writes particle accelerator documentation for Wolfram Research.

2020

Omar Olmos

Instituto Technologico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey

Areas: Computational Physics, Data Science, Education, Machine Learning, Mathematics Courseware Design, Physics

Omar Olmos is north regional director of science and engineering for the Monterrey Institute of Technology, where he uses Mathematica for a range of education and research tasks. In addition to developing interactive examples, tutorials and other student resources, he uses Wolfram Language machine-learning analytics to predict student performance. Omar has also used Mathematica to model electromagnetic waves interacting with nanostructures, performing numeric experimentation to study new nanoscale optical effects.

2020

Guy F. de Téramond Peralta

Universidad de Costa Rica

Areas: Computational Physics, Education, Physics

Guy F. de Téramond Peralta is a theoretical physicist focusing on hadron structure, nuclear forces and group structure of grand unified theories. He uses Mathematica throughout his research, including ongoing contributions to light-front holographic QCD, a novel approach to hadron structure and dynamics. Guy’s work spans several decades and is widely cited in the physics community; he currently serves as a professor of physics at the University of Costa Rica.

2018

Aaron Santos

Data Scientist, EMC Insurance

Areas: Authoring and Publishing, Computational Physics, Data Science, Industrial Engineering, Internet of Things, Nanotechnology, Risk Analysis

Dr. Santos is a data scientist, professor and author who uses Wolfram technology to advance data and device integration in a variety of sectors. He and his team at EMC Insurance have used the Wolfram Language and Wolfram Enterprise Private Cloud for valuable research analyzing data from IoT devices to help improve driver safety, reduce fuel consumption and identify worksite hazards. As part of a recent startup, Dr. Santos also worked on the development of a nanotechnology device for efficiently identifying the genetic makeup of food products, with future plans to integrate Wolfram Cloud technology to provide additional analytics and services to consumers.

2015

Paul Abbott

Associate Professor of Physics, University of Western Australia

Areas: Applied Mathematics, Computational Physics, Image and Signal Processing, Mathematical Modeling, Mathematics Courseware Design, Theoretical Physics

Paul Abbott has used Mathematica extensively for research in wavelets and few-body atomic physics and to explore problems in computational and mathematical physics. He received a computational science award for his course in computational physics and has lectured on Mathematica in the United States, Japan, Singapore, Thailand, and India, and at several Australian universities. Abbott worked for Wolfram Research from 1989 to 1991, has served as a contributing editor of The Mathematica Journal since 1990, and has worked as a consultant to Wolfram Research since 1997.

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