Dr. Omar Ghattas is a Professor of Geological Sciences and Mechanical Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. He is also the Director of the Center for Computational Geosciences and Optimization in the Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences (ICES) and holds the John A. and Katherine G. Jackson Chair in Computational Geosciences. He is a member of the faculty in the Computational Science, Engineering, and Mathematics (CSEM) interdisciplinary PhD program in ICES, and holds courtesy appointments in Computer Science and Biomedical Engineering. He has general research interests in forward and inverse modeling, optimization, and uncertainty quantification of large-scale complex mechanical, geological, and biological systems. He received the ACM Gordon Bell Prize in 2003 (for Special Achievement) and again in 2015 (for Scalability), and was a finalist for the 2008, 2010, and 2012 Bell Prizes. He is a Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM).