Bell is an American mathematician and the Chief Scientist of the Computational Research Division at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
He has also worked on the application of these numerical methods to problems from a broad range of fields, including combustion, shock physics, seismology, flow in porous media and astrophysics.
Following a three-year stint at the Naval Surface Weapons Center, he spent four years at Exxon Production Research, where he was the group leader of the Applied Mathematics Group in the Long Range Research Division.
He was one of the founders and is the current managing editor of Communications in Applied Mathematics and Computational Science (CAMCOS).
[1] In 2018, Bell received the Berkeley Lab Prize Lifetime Achievement Award for "intellectual and strategic leadership in applied mathematics at LBNL, and for design and development of sophisticated numerical strategies to address critical scientific problems in support of DOE’s research missions.".