2/20/2026 Siv Schwink for Illinois Physics
Witek will begin her appointment as vice chair at the society’s March Meeting, now dubbed the Global Physics Summit. The chair line represents a four-year commitment of service, and Witek will in subsequent years fill the roles of chair-elect, chair, and then past chair.
Written by Siv Schwink for Illinois Physics
Illinois Physics Professor Helvi Witek has been elected to the chair line of the American Physical Society’s Division of Computational Physics (DCOMP). Founded in 1986, the division has a membership of over 3,000 scientists working in a range of subfields, from condensed matter physics and materials science to high-energy physics and astrophysics. Together, they are advancing computational techniques for physics education and research, as well as exploring the role that physics plays in the development of computer technology.
Witek will begin her appointment as vice chair at the society’s March Meeting, now dubbed the Global Physics Summit. The chair line represents a four-year commitment of service, and Witek will in subsequent years fill the roles of chair-elect, chair, and then past chair.
In her candidate’s statement, Witek wrote that she would enjoy supporting existing successful initiatives, including joint sessions of DCOMP with other APS divisions and the Early Career Office Hour. She said she would further like to introduce a new monthly virtual seminar series to engage DCOMP members and showcase their research.
Witek said, “I am looking forward to further strengthening the communication, interaction, and participation of the DCOMP community and to helping enable the transfer of knowledge and expertise across vastly different applications of computational physics.
“Recent technological advancements pose both extraordinary scientific opportunities and new responsibilities to ensure that they are used sustainably and ethically. As vice chair of the DCOMP Executive Committee, I plan to engage the DCOMP community in conversation on these opportunities, their sustainable use, and their benefits for science and society.”
DCOMP meets annually at both the APS March and April Meetings. The division’s expressed goals are to promote R&D in computational physics, to enhance the prestige and professional standing of its members, to encourage scholarly publication, and to promote international cooperation in these activities.
Witek is an internationally recognized expert in gravitation, numerical relativity, and gravitational waves. Numerical relativity refers to the development and use of high-performance computing cyberinfrastructures to numerically model the coalescence of black holes and neutron stars. Witek is co-PI of the Einstein Toolkit, an open-source software infrastructure for computational astrophysics that has over 460 registered members worldwide. She served as co-chair of the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) Waveform Working Group from 2018 to 2024; LISA is a space-based gravitational wave detector mission adopted by the European Space Agency (ESA) and NASA.
Witek received her PhD in 2012 from the University of Lisbon in Portugal. She held postdoctoral appointments at the University of Cambridge from 2012 to 2015 and at the University of Nottingham from 2015 to 2016. During her tenure as Marie Sklodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow (a prestigious award of the European Commission of the EU) at the University of Barcelona from 2016 to 2017, she developed her open-source software Canuda. In 2018, she received a highly competitive Royal Society University Research Fellowship in the UK. In 2020, she joined the physics faculty at The Grainger College of Engineering, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She holds additional appointments in the Department of Astronomy and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at Illinois.