People
40 Under 40: New Generation of Leaders Who Are Keeping America Competitive
By Jay Albritron
May 5, 2010, 15:31

Gonzalo Alvarez is a scientific staff member in the Computer Science and Mathematics Division at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. And jointly, at ORNL's Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences, which is one of just five Nanoscale Science Research Centers established by the Department of Energy's Office of Science, as user facilities for the nanoscience community.

Alvarez works with the Nanomaterials Theory Institute, where he performs theoretical and computational research in nanomaterials science for both in-house and in-user projects. His work focuses on the theoretical understanding of correlated electron systems in condensed matter, such as manganites, diluted magnetic semiconductors and high temperature superconducting cuprates.

He also lead the development of the DCA++ code to study using the Dynamic Cluster Approximation (DCA) models of high-temperature superconductors. Alvarez and the DCA++ team recently won the most prestigious prize in high performance computing--the Gordon Bell Prize for Peak Performance--for their petascale simulations of high-temperature superconductors.