Computational researcher Dean N. Williams has been named one of the Distinguished Members of Technical Staff for extraordinary scientific and technical contributions to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and its missions, as acknowledged by his professional peers and the larger community. Williams, one of the 11 recipients, has been recognized for contributing high-level achievements in climate science for more than 25 years.

Williams served as the principal investigator of the Ultra-Scale Visualization Climate Data Analysis Tools and is currently a collaborative institutional lead for the Accelerated Climate Modeling for Energy (ACME) project, sponsored by the Earth System Modeling program within the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Office of Biological and Environmental Research. His scientific efforts have led to the development of the hardware and software infrastructure that are required for successfully distributing model output, which is now a community-wide activity.

In addition to leading these projects, he has also led or co-led other DOE, National Science Foundation, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and international projects and sits on national and international scientific advisory boards, such as the DOE Advanced Scientific Computing Advisory Committee, the DOE Next Generation Climate Modeling Council, and the European G8 ExArch Advisory Board. Willliams is also the Chair of the Earth System Grid Federation—a multi-agency, international collaboration whose purpose is to develop the software infrastructure needed to facilitate and empower the study of climate change on a global scale.

Earning the Distinguished Members of Technical Staff  designation is the highest technical staff level achievable by a scientist or engineer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.