Theresa Windus, the Interim Director of Chemical and Biological Sciences at Ames Laboratory and Distinguished Professor of Chemistry and Liberal Arts and Sciences Dean’s Professor at Iowa State University, has been named a Fellow of the American Chemical Society (ACS).
The ACS Fellows Program recognizes members for their outstanding achievements in and contributions to the science of chemistry, and for their service to ACS.
Windus, one of 53 members named to the 2020 class of Fellows, will be honored at the ACS Fall National Meeting, to be held virtually in August.
Windus joined Iowa State University as a full professor and an associate researcher with DOE’s Ames Laboratory in August of 2006. She develops new methods and algorithms for high performance computational chemistry as well as applying those techniques to both basic and applied research.
Her current interests are rare earth and heavy element chemistry, catalysis, reaction mechanisms, photochemistry, and design and development of efficient and novel massively parallel chemistry algorithms. Theresa is involved in the development of both NWChem and GAMESS, high-performance computational open source software programs and is the director for the NWChemEx Exascale Computing Project.
Windus was named Interim Director of Ames Laboratory’s Chemical and Biological Sciences Division in 2019. She is a research project leader for the Critical Materials Institute, Ames Laboratory’s Energy Innovation Hub. She is also the deputy director for the Molecular Sciences Software Institute funded by the National Science Foundation.
Theresa holds B.A. degrees in Chemistry, Mathematics and Computer Science from Minot State University and a Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry from Iowa State University. She has held several positions at other government labs including being the Director of Computational Chemistry/Training at the Wright Patterson Air Force Base Major Shared Resource Center and the Technical Lead for the Molecular Science Software Group and the Visualization and User Services group in the Molecular Science Computing Facility in the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.
Ames Laboratory is a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science national laboratory operated by Iowa State University. Ames Laboratory creates innovative materials, technologies and energy solutions. We use our expertise, unique capabilities and interdisciplinary collaborations to solve global problems.
DOE’s Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit science.energy.gov.