Robert Robey

Robert (Bob) Robey is a technical staff scientist in the Computational Physics Division at Los Alamos National Laboratory and an adjunct researcher at the University of New Mexico. He is a founder of the Parallel Computing Summer Research Internships started in 2016. He is a member of the NSF/IEEE-TCPP Curriculum Initiative on Parallel and Distributed Computing. Bob is a board member of the New Mexico Supercomputing Challenge, a high school and middle school educational program in its 30th year. He has mentored hundreds of students over the years and has twice been recognized as a Los Alamos Distinguished Student Mentor. Bob co-taught a parallel computing class at University of New Mexico and has given guest lectures at other universities.

Bob began his scientific career by operating explosive-driven and compressible gas-driven shock tubes at the University of New Mexico. This includes the largest explosively-driven shock tube in the world at 20 feet in diameter and over 800 feet long. He conducted hundreds of experiments with explosions and shock waves. To support his experimental work, Bob has written several compressible fluid dynamics codes since the early 1990s and has authored many articles in international journals and publications. Full 3D simulations were a rarity at the time, stressing compute resources to the limit. The search for more compute resources led to his involvement in high performance computing research.

Bob worked 12 years at the University of New Mexico conducting experiments, writing, and running compressible fluid dynamics simulations, and started a high performance computing center. He was a lead proposal writer and brought tens of millions of dollars of research grants to the university. Since 1998, he has held a position at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. While there, he contributed to large multi-physics codes running on a variety of the latest hardware.

Bob is a world-class kayaker with first descents down previously unrun rivers in Mexico and New Mexico. He is also a mountaineer with ascents of peaks on three continents up to over 18,000 feet in elevation. He is a leader in the co-ed Los Alamos Venture crew and helps out with multi-day trips down western rivers.

Bob is a graduate of Texas A&M University with a Masters in Business Administration and a Bachelors degree in Mechanical Engineering. He has taken graduate coursework at University of New Mexico in the Mathematics Department.