Dochan Kwak

As Chief of the NAS Applications Branch , Dochan Kwak oversees the division's effort to develop enabling computational technologies and perform path-finding applications research in high-end computing.

Kwak has broad experience in computational fluid dynamics and computational physics. In his 22-year career at Ames Research Center, he has served as chief of the both the Advanced Computational Methods and the Computational Physics and Simulations branches. Previously, he was a staff scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory. He holds a bachelor of science degree in mechanical engineering from Seoul National University, and a Ph.D. in aeronautics and astronautics from Stanford University.

Among Kwak's many achievements is a patent (shared with several inventors) for the DeBakey Ventricular Assist Device, a miniature heart pump that prolongs the life of patients awaiting heart transplants. Kwak has received many other honors, including the first NASA Software of the Year award, for developing INS3D, a CFD code used for solving steady-state and time varying flow problems. He was inducted into the Space Technology Hall of Fame in April 1999.