Prize Recipient

Mitchell A Wood
Sandia National Laboratories

"For the development and application of ground-breaking computational approaches to the study of complex physical processes in materials undergoing dynamic compression, including initiation in energetic materials, strength in metals, and phase change kinetics in compressed diamond."

Mitchell Wood is a Principal Member of the Technical Staff at Sandia National Labs in the Center for Computing Research. He holds a Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering from Purdue University (2016), a B.S. in Physics from Michigan State University (2011) and has been at Sandia first as a postdoc, then a staff member since 2018. His work has focused on multiscale modeling and simulation methods of matter in extreme conditions, and in the utilization of machine learning in predictive simulations where he has been an active developer of widely-used software tools in this area. Key contributions include understanding of non-equilibrium reactions in shock compressed energetic materials, multi-scale treatment of strength in metals and high-pressure phase transformation kinetics of carbon. Other honors include a R&D100 award for his contributions to the LAMMPS molecular dynamics software and finalist for the Gordon Bell Prize from the Association for Computing Machinery.