Rate My Professor Alistair Rendell

Professor Alistair Rendell is an Emeritus Professor in the College of Science and Engineering at Flinders University, specifically within the Physical Sciences division. He served as Vice President and Executive Dean for the College of Science and Engineering from January 2019 until December 2025. Prior to Flinders University, Rendell had a 23-year career at the Australian National University, culminating as Director of the Research School of Computer Science. He began his research career with a postdoctoral position at NASA Ames Research Center in the early 1990s, focusing on vector supercomputers. Rendell holds a Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry from Durham University, completed in 1983, and a PhD in theoretical chemistry.

Rendell's research specializes in computational chemistry, particularly solving the Schrödinger equation for atoms and molecules using high-end computers. He has developed contributions to widely used computational chemistry software packages and led collaborative projects with companies such as IBM, Microsoft, Fujitsu, and Intel. His work extends to exascale computing platforms, and he participates in a US-led project for related software development. With 157 publications and over 28,000 citations on ResearchGate, alongside 6,264 citations and an h-index of 62 on Google Scholar, his influence in high-performance computing for quantum chemistry is notable. Key publications include 'Scaling Correlated Fragment Molecular Orbital Calculations on Summit' (2023), 'The General Atomic and Molecular Electronic Structure System (GAMESS): Novel Methods on Novel Architectures' (2023, Journal of Chemical Theory and Computation), 'Toward an extreme-scale electronic structure system' (2023, Journal of Chemical Physics), 'Enabling Large-Scale Correlated Electronic Structure Calculations: Scaling the RI-MP2 Method on Summit' (2021), and 'Faster Self-Consistent Field (SCF) Calculations on GPU Clusters' (2021, Journal of Chemical Theory and Computation).