DAS Faculty elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Berni J. Alder, professor emeritus in the Department of Applied Science and a researcher at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, has been elected as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Alder is widely regarded as the founder of molecular dynamics, a type of computer simulation used for studying the motions and interactions of atoms over time.
Alder did his undergraduate work at UC Berkeley and, in the late 1940s, studied for his Ph.D. at the California Institute of Technology, where he met computer designer Stan Frankel. Using CalTech's mechanical computers, Alder and Frankel developed a computer technique, now called the Monte Carlo method, for calculating results from random sampling. Edward Teller and colleagues at the Los Alamos National Laboratory developed essentially the same technique independently.
Alder continued developing his ideas at UC Berkeley and became a consultant to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory when it opened in 1952 under Teller's leadership. At the time, the connection to Livermore provided access to some of the only electronic computers in the nation. Alder joined the national lab full-time in 1955 and published his pioneering work on molecular dynamics in 1956.
In 1963, Alder helped found the UC Davis Department of Applied Science, which offers undergraduate and graduate programs in physical sciences and engineering at UC Davis and at Livermore. Among numerous other honors, he is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
Today, molecular dynamics and Monte Carlo methods are now widely used across a wide range of sciences, from fundamental physics to molecular biology. But at the time, those methods marked a radical change in how scientists thought about such problems, said Ann Orel, professor and chair of the Department of Applied Science.
"What he did was amazing," Orel said. "It was really out-of-the-box thinking for the times."