Professor Alistair Rendell

Alistair Rendell joined Flinders University as Vice President and Executive Dean for the College of Science and Engineering at the start of 2019. Prior to that he was Director of the Research School of Computer Science at the Australian National Uinversity. He began his career by studying chemistry as an undergraduate and theoretical chemistry as a PhD student. Solving the Schrodinger equation for atoms and molecules requires high end computers which led him to a postdoctoral position at the NASA Ames Research Centre in the early 90s working on the latest vector supercomputers. Since then he has made significant contributions to a number of widely used computational chemistry packages and led collaborative projects with companies including IBM, Microsoft, Fujitsu, Intel. He is currently part of a US led project to develop software for exascale computing platforms - computers capable of performing 10 to the power of 18 operations per second.