Clint Dawson

Biography

Dr. Clint Dawson is the Department Chair and holds the John J. McKetta Centennial Energy Chair in Engineering in the Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics, and is the director of the Computational Hydraulics Group in the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences. He received Bachelor of Arts and Master of Science degrees in mathematics from Texas Tech University in 1982 and 1984, respectively. He received his Ph.D. from Rice University in 1988 in mathematical sciences. From 1988 to 1990 he was a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow and Dickson Instructor in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Chicago. In 1990 he returned to Rice as an assistant professor in the Department of Computational and Applied Mathematics. He was promoted to associate professor at Rice University in 1994. He moved to the University of Texas in 1995. He was promoted to full professor in 2000. He was named the Edward S. Hyman Endowed Chair in Engineering in 2011 and received the John J. McKetta Centennial Energy Chair in Engineering in 2014.  

Dr. Dawson has authored or co-authored over 200 technical articles in the areas of numerical analysis, numerical methods and parallel computing, with applications to flow and transport in porous media, and shallow water systems. In 2001, he was elected Chair of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics Activity Group on Geosciences. He has served on numerous conference organizing committees, review panels, and editorial boards. He is currently managing editor of Computational Geosciences. In 2011, he was given the Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences Distinguished Research Excellence Award. He received the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics Geosciences Career Prize in 2013.  He was named a Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics in 2016.

In 2024, Dawson received The University of Texas President's Research Impact Award, which recognizes university researchers whose scholarly or creative endeavors have changed lives and the way we look at and understand the world. Dawson's work has been instrumental in developing a simulation code that is used worldwide in coastal ocean modeling and hurricane storm surge predictions. A video highlighting Dawson's work was created for the award ceremony. 

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