Paul Woodward received his Ph.D. in physics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1973. He has focused his research on simulations of compressible flows in astrophysics, studying problems in star formation, supersonic jet propagation, convection in stars, and astrophysical turbulence. To carry out this work, he has developed, with various collaborators, numerical methods for fluid flow simulations, the best known of which is the PPM gas dynamics scheme, and has implemented these on a variety of very large computing systems. After working 11 years at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory over the period from 1968 to 1985, he joined the University of Minnesota faculty in 1985 as a Minnesota Supercomputer Institute Fellow in the department of astronomy. He was Director of Graphics and Visualization at the University’s Army High Performance Computing Research Center from 1990 to 1995, and founded the University’s Laboratory for Computational Science & Engineering (LCSE), which he directs, and which is now part of the University’s Digital Technology Center. In 1994, in collaboration with Silicon Graphics, his team developed the PowerWall visualization system, and the first PowerWall system was installed at the LCSE in 1995. The LCSE concentrates on high performance parallel computation and the data analysis and visualization that this requires. Woodward received the IEEE’s Sidney Fernbach award in large-scale computing in 1995 and, with 12 collaborators at Livermore, Minnesota, and IBM, received the Gordon Bell prize in the performance category in 1999.