Beginning in fall 2011, SEAS welcomes applications for the Secondary Field in Computational Science and Engineering (CSE). This Secondary Field is available to any student enrolled in a Ph.D. program in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, upon approval of a plan of study by the CSE Program Committee and the student’s home department Director of Graduate Studies.

CSE is an exciting and rapidly evolving field that exploits the power of computation as an approach to major challenges on the frontiers of natural and social science and all engineering fields. In keeping with Harvard's emphasis on foundational knowledge, our program will focus on cross-cutting mathematical and computational principles important across disciplines.

Completion of the Secondary Field will equip students with rigorous computational methods for approaching scientific questions. These approaches include mathematical techniques for modeling and simulation of complex systems; parallel programming and collaborative software development; and methods for organizing, exploring, visualizing, processing and analyzing very large data sets.

Admission

Admission into the CSE Secondary Field is by application, which must be submitted to the SEAS Student Affairs Office. Students interested in the Secondary Field should consult with their departmental Director of Graduate Studies (DGS) no later than the first semester of the third year of study. Applications may be submitted twice a year, in the spring semester (deadline, March 1) and fall semester (deadline, October 1) for the following academic term. The application, which will include a proposed Plan of Study, must also be approved by the home department DGS. The DGS in CSE will respond to all applications within one month.

Requirements

Each student's plan of study for the Secondary Field will include:

• at least one Applied Mathematics core course and one Computer Science core course
• an elective in AM or CS (chosen from lists below)
  
• either a “domain elective”—an approved computation-intensive course within the Ph.D. domain—or a semester-length independent research project
• as a final requirement, an oral examination by a faculty committee

Course requirements at a glance:

*must take at least one AM and one CS core course

1. Core: 2–4 courses

The goal of the core courses is to provide:

• the mathematical foundations for computational science
• hands-on instruction in relevant ideas in Computer Science
• experience implementing these principles in collaborative projects in a rigorous software engineering environment

2. Applied Math electives: 0-2 courses

 3. Computer Science electives: 0-2 courses

*proposed

4. Domain elective or 299R research course

A domain elective is a computation-intensive course outside CS and AM. A student wishing to earn Secondary Field credit for a proposed domain elective or 299R course must propose these courses in the Plan of Study and receive approval of the CSE Program Committee.

Advising and Academic Monitoring

A faculty member on the CSE Program Committee will serve in the role of Director of Graduate Studies for the Secondary Field, taking primary responsibility for advising students in creating a meaningful program sensitive to the student’s needs. This individual will actively work to develop independent research projects and external research opportunities for all IACS students to maximize learning and skill acquisition and will help with the design of individual projects. All students will participate in the activities of the IACS community, which will include technical and interdisciplinary colloquia and skill-building workshops.

The CSE Program Committee

• Katia Bertoldi, Assistant Professor of Applied Mechanics
• Michael P. Brenner, Glover Professor of Applied Mathematics and Applied Physics
• Efthimios Kaxiras, Director, John Hasbrouck Van Vleck Professor of Pure and Applied Physics
• David C. Parkes, Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science
• Hanspeter Pfister, Gordon McKay Professor of the Practice of Computer Science
• Margo Seltzer, Herchel Smith Professor of Computer Science and Harvard College Professor
• Eli Tziperman, Pamela and Vasco McCoy, Jr. Professor of Oceanography and Applied Physics