The Pierce Lab
California Institute of Technology
Biography
Niles Pierce was born in 1971, growing up in rural Fallbrook, CA. As an undergraduate, he attended Princeton University, performing thesis research with Prof. Antony Jameson on shock capturing schemes for unsteady inviscid compressible flow, and graduating in 1993 with a BSE in Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering and a Certificate in Applied & Computational Mathematics.
As a graduate student, he attended Oxford University on a Rhodes Scholarship, working with Prof. Michael Giles on preconditioned multigrid methods for anisotropic viscous flow calculations, and receiving a DPhil in Applied Mathematics in 1997. Pierce remained in Oxford for a further year as a Research Officer in Numerical Analysis, working with Giles on adjoint error analysis for functionals of solutions to partial differential equations.
In 1998, Pierce's research program shifted from computational fluid dynamics to computational biomolecular design after arriving at Caltech as a Senior Postdoctoral Scholar in Computational Molecular Biology. There, he worked with Prof. Stephen Mayo on algorithms for computational protein design.
In 2000, Pierce was appointed Assistant Professor of Applied & Computational Mathematics at Caltech, receiving a joint appointment in Bioengineering in 2004. In 2006, Pierce was appointed Associate Professor of Applied & Computational Mathematics and Bioengineering at Caltech. His research group is focused on programming biomolecular function.
