ORNL postdoctoral researcher selected as 2026 BSSw Fellow

Postdoctoral associate Jakob Bludau from the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory was named a 2026 Better Scientific Software (BSSw) Fellow, recognizing his leadership in advancing sustainable, high-performance scientific software and highlighting ORNL's role in shaping the future of computational science.

Bludau is a developer specializing in modern C++ and Kokkos. C++ is a programming language while Kokkos is a an open-source programming model and library that uses C++. His work has contributed to performance-portable software that enables scientific applications to run efficiently across today's diverse high-performance computing architectures. Bludau's efforts also directly support ORNL's mission to deliver cutting-edge computing capabilities for science, energy and national security while ensuring those capabilities remain accessible and viable for the broader research community.

The BSSw Fellowship program recognizes individuals who improve the productivity, quality and long-term sustainability of scientific software. As scientific discovery relies more heavily on complex codes and large-scale simulations, the practices used to design, maintain and evolve software are now as important as the computing systems themselves.

"I am very grateful for this opportunity and am looking forward to working on my Fellowship project," said Bludau. "I am thrilled to work closely with many software projects that actively advance science today. I hope my efforts can serve this community and support it in solving the big challenges ahead"

Each year, BSSw Fellows are selected through a competitive process that includes proposing a funded activity designed to benefit the scientific software community. For 2026, Fellows will receive up to $25,000 through their home institutions to carry out a one-year project that produces a publicly available artifact, such as a tutorial, workshop or educational resource. These activities are intended to share best practices and strengthen the broader ecosystem of scientific software developers.

Bludau's project aims to create a simple, shared collection of coding design patterns that help developers write software that runs efficiently on different types of supercomputer hardware without needing deep hardware-specific expertise. His selection reflects ORNL's long-standing leadership in software-enabled science, complementing the laboratory's world-class computing facilities, which includes Frontier, the world's first exascale supercomputer.

"We are thrilled to see Jakob honored as a BSSw Fellow," said ORNL senior computational scientist Damien Lebrun-Grandie. "His commitment to creating shared, accessible coding patterns is exactly the kind of leadership the scientific community needs right now. The BSSw program is an invaluable partner in our mission at ORNL to treat scientific software as a durable and essential instrument of discovery."

The BSSw Fellowship program also emphasizes community building. Fellows are encouraged to remain engaged as alumni by mentoring others, helping select future Fellows and serving as advocates for sustainable scientific software practices.

UT-Battelle manages ORNL for the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science, the largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States. The Office of Science is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit energy.gov/science. - Mark Alewine