# 19) Careers in applied mathematics and computational science

1. National Labs
2. Industrial R&D
3. Academia
4. Research Software Engineering
5. Personal resources


## 1. National Labs

* Department of Energy
  * Office of Science (Berkeley, Argonne, Pacific Northwest, ...)
  * National Nuclear Security Administration (Livermore, Los Alamos, Sandia)
  * Office of Renewable Energy (NREL)
* National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)
  * Weather and climate, operational numerical weather prediction and research
* National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR)
  * Comprehensive climate focus (includes ocean, sea ice, land ice, land)
* National Institute of Standards and Technology
  * Fundamental materials (e.g., gas equations of state), metrology
* National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)
  * Earth research, especially remote sensing (satellite and aerial)
  * Fluid and structural mechanics for safe, reliable, efficient flight (includes partnerships with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA))
  * Materials science and engineering (overlapping scope with industry)

### Private companies that "feel" like a National Lab (or closely collaborate with federal agencies)
* [General Atomics](https://www.ga.com/about/): GA is the principal private sector participant in thermonuclear fusion research through its internationally recognized DIII-D and inertial confinement programs for the US Department of Energy, among other things (e.g., unmanned aircrafts, radars, tc)

### Examples of lab/agency-led software

* HPC Middleware (MPI implementations, resource managers)
* Numerical Libraries (PETSc, hypre, Sundials, Trilinos, MFEM)
* Open source simulation applications (MOOSE library, LAMMPS, Nek, Albany)
* Internal/export controlled simulation (BLAST, FUN3D, Sierra, MCNP, MOOSE apps)
  * Nuclear reactor safety, stockpile stewardship, proprietary designs
  * [Goodyear-Sandia partnership on tire simulation](https://newsreleases.sandia.gov/goodyear-sandia/)
* Community Earth System Model (NCAR), Energy Exascale Earth System Model (E3SM)
* Some orgs publicly embrace open source [LLNL Open Source](https://software.llnl.gov/)

## 2. Industrial R&D

* Hardware vendors and cloud providers: CUDA, HIP, SYCL, OpenMP, MPI
  * "Science/engineering should use our programming models/run fast on our hardware"
  * "Data science" (statistical computing) should also be fast
* High-stakes methods development
  * Example: [High-Lift Prediction Workshop](https://hiliftpw.larc.nasa.gov/)
* Research papers in specific venues are valuable
* Windows into industrial research culture
  * Who participates in comparison studies, standards organizations, etc.?
  * Who attends technical conferences (not trade shows) and holds elected positions in professional societies?

## 3. Academia

* Tenure-track
  * Teaching
  * External funding is mainly to support students and research staff
  * Eternally swimming in hats
* Research faculty/research software engineer
  * Usually reliant on external grants, often a "center"
  * There are some "research software engineering" facility/service groups (e.g., [Princeton](https://researchcomputing.princeton.edu/news/2022/princeton-bets-big-research-software-engineering)) that may serve several projects. On the other hand, there are positions that are project specifc. See a few examples below:
  * SDSU [CSRC](https://www.csrc.sdsu.edu/)
  * The [Institute of Computing for Climate Science (ICCS)](https://iccs.cam.ac.uk/) at the University of Cambridge
  * [CU Institutes](https://www.colorado.edu/research/research-institutes) (CIRES, INSTAAR, LASP, JILA, BioFrontiers, ...)
  * [CliMA](https://clima.caltech.edu/)
  * [VESRI](https://www.schmidtsciences.org/virtual-earth-system-research-institute-vesri/)

## 4. Research Software Engineering

- Resources for community Scientific Software in CSE: [Better Scientific Software (BSSw)](https://bssw.io/)
- United States Research Software Engineering Association ([US-RSE](https://us-rse.org/))

## 5. Personal Resources
You can find a talk on my [website](https://valeriabarra.org/talks/) that I gave a few years ago to my Alma Mather. Let's give a look together at the [slides](https://valeriabarra.org/talks/NJITAlumnaTalk22.pdf).