Bill Spotz
Senior Member of Technical Staff
Contact Information:
wfspotz@sandia.govP. O. Box 5800
Albuquerque, NM 87185-0370
(505) 845-0170
(505) 284-0154 fax
Experience
Bill Spotz received his BS, MS, and PhD in aerospace engineering from the University of Texas at Austin in 1989, 1991, and 1995, respectively, and has a number of papers to his credit. His area of research was computational fluid dynamics, with a dissertation topic of high-order compact finite difference methods. Bill did his post-doc with the Advanced Studies Program at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado, followed by a three-year tenure as a project scientist in the Scientific Computing Division. At NCAR, he applied high-order numerical methods to global atmospheric models.
In 2001, Bill joined Sandia as a Senior Member of Technical Staff, where he has worked on coloring algorithms, nonlinear coupling of multiphysics problems and is a primary member of the team building a climate modeling program at Sandia. Bill also provides development for the parallel, object-oriented, Trilinos solver project, and is a Trilinos Leader.
Some General Background
Bill grew up in Clear Lake, Texas, home to NASA's Johnson Space Center. His father worked first for TRW on software for Apollo and later for IBM developing on-board software for the space shuttle. Bill worked for Barrios Technologies, a NASA contractor his last two summers in high school. He aided Dr. Wallace Fowler in the revision of a flight design training course and document ground-based avionics software.
This exposure to the space program inspired Bill in 1985 to enter the Department of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. During this period, he worked summers at IBM, and spent his final tour in the department that tests on-board space shuttle software. Bill helped develop a visualization tool for testing software control of the shuttle's reaction control system. At the University, Dr. Graham Carey took Bill under his wing. He got Bill working in the Computational Fluid Dynamics Laboratory where he started his study of High-Order Compact Finite Difference Methods.
In 1996, Bill started work at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, where he was a Postoctoral Fellow in the Advanced Study Program. Subsequently, Bill became a project scientist with the Computational Sciences Section of the Scientific Computing Division, developing numerical methods for global climate modeling and related phenomena.
In 1993, Bill married Katie Simons, also a U.T. Aerospace Engineering graduate, who worked for Rockwell Space Operations Company in Houston, designing shuttle flight plans for rendezvous missions. Katie designed shuttle trajectories for Spartan and Mir rendezvous missions and supported Mission Control for those missions, the Hubble Space Telescope repair mission, as well as many others. She later worked at Raytheon in Denver as a systems engineer setting up ground stations for international communications satellites. Katie is currently working on a masters in electrical engineering at UNM, and works part-time for General Dynamics.
Research Description
- An introduction to high-order compact methods
- A description of Bill's work on shallow water equations on the sphere
- PyTrilinos, a python interface to Trilinos
- NumPy.i, typemaps for SWIG for interfacing to NumPy
Professional Information
- Vita
- Publications and Presentations
- Statement of Research Interests
- Statement of Teaching Philosophy
- Related Links
Updated: 8/13/2007