With the support of the Provost and the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, the FSU Board of Trustees, at its June meeting, approved the formation of the new Department of Scientific Computing. The fifteen founding faculty of the new department are drawn from the School of Computational Science; these faculty formerly were affiliated with the Departments of Biological Sciences, Chemical and Biomedical Engineering, Chemistry, Geological Sciences, Mathematics, Mechanical Engineering, and Physics. Eppes Professor Max Gunzburger will serve as the first chair of the new department. The new department also inherits the graduate degree programs previously offered by the School of Computational Science.

The creation of the new department recognizes the central importance of computations in scientific inquiry and technological design. The missions of the new department are, in short, to perform cutting-edge interdisciplinary research in computational science, to offer innovative degree programs that address the pressing need to train the next generation of computational scientists, and to support environments for high-performance computing on the FSU campus.