Biographies for Presenters

Galen Arnold
Galen Arnold is a system engineer at NCSA. He's worked in the systems, consulting, and training groups and does consulting and training for both internal staff and external users. He completed a BS in Math at UIUC in 1987, and has been using Unix systems since 1985.

Phil Blood
Philip Blood received his Bachelor's degree in Microbiology from Brigham Young University in 2001 and his Ph.D. in Bioengineering from the University of Utah in 2008. At the University of Utah he joined the research group of Greg Voth where he used massively parallel molecular dynamics simulations to study how proteins remodel cellular membranes. In 2007 Philip joined the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center as a Sr. Scientific Specialist in the Scientific Applications and User Support group. He currently works with scientists in the fields of computational chemistry, biophysics, and various other disciplines to advance science through supercomputing.

Brett Bode
Brett M. Bode is Blue Waters Software Development Manager at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. He is responsible for managing the software development projects at NCSA and partner organizations that are focused on improving the quality and capability of the software that will be deployed on the Blue Waters system. Prior to joining NCSA in 2008 Brett spent nearly ten years as a scientist with the Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory at Iowa State University. At Ames Laboratory Brett pursued a variety of projects aimed at improving the performance of real applications on HPC cluster systems from communication driver performance to the optimization of parallel file systems on InfiniBand networks. Brett holds a BS in chemistry and physics from Illinois State University and a PhD in physical chemistry from Iowa State University.

Lonnie Crosby
Lonnie earned his Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry from The University of Memphis. After which, he pursued a postdoctoral position at Iowa State University. Lonnie joined the National Institute for Computational Sciences (NICS) in 2008 as a Computational Scientist. He works directly with users to enable them to take full advantage of available computational resources. His areas of expertise include computational chemistry, electronic structure theory, statistical mechanics, and chemical kinetics.

Dr. Thom H. Dunning, Jr.
Thom H. Dunning, Jr. is the director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and the Institute for Advanced Computing Applications and Technologies and Distinguished Chair for Research Excellence in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. As the director of NCSA and IACAT, Dr. Dunning is responsible for ensuring that Illinois and NCSA remains a world leader in the development and deployment of advanced cyberinfrastructure, including the world's most powerful supercomputer, Blue Waters.

Dr. Dunning has authored nearly 150 scientific publications on topics ranging from computational techniques for molecular calculations to computational studies of high power lasers and the chemical reactions involved in combustion; five of his papers are "citation classics." He was the scientific leader of the DOE's first "Grand Challenge" in computational chemistry. Dr. Dunning is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He received DOE's E.O. Lawrence Award in 1996 and its Distinguished Associate Award in 2001. Dr. Dunning obtained his bachelor's degree in Chemistry in 1965 from the University of Missouri-Rolla and his doctorate in Chemistry/Chemical Physics from the California Institute of Technology in 1970.

Rebecca Hartman-Baker
Rebecca Hartman-Baker is a computational scientist at the National Center for Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. She obtained her Ph.D. In Computer Science, with a certificate in Computational Science and Engineering, from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research interests include inverse and ill-posed problems, optimization, high-performance computing, and load balancing at the petascale and beyond. In her spare time Rebecca enjoys spending time with her husband and three-year-old son.

Scott Lathrop
Scott Lathrop splits his time between being the TeraGrid Director of Education, Outreach and Training (EOT) at the University of Chicago/Argonne National Laboratory, and being the Blue Waters Technical Program Manager for Education for NCSA. Lathrop has been involved in high performance computing and communications activities since 1986. Lathrop coordinates education, outreach and training activities among the eleven Resource Providers involved in the TeraGrid project. He coordinates undergraduate and graduate education activities for the Blue Waters project. Lathrop is Co-PI on the NSF funded Computational Science Education Reference Desk (CSERD), a Pathways project of the National Science Digital Library (NSDL) program. Lathrop coordinated the creation of the SC07-11 Education Programs and is the SC11 Conference Chair. Paul A. Navratil
Paul is a Visualization Scientist in the Data and Information Analysis division of the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at the University of Texas at Austin. His research interests include efficient algorithms for large-scale parallel visualization and data analysis (VDA) and innovative design for large-scale VDA systems. His recent work includes algorithms for ultrascale distributed-memory ray tracing, work that enables photo-realistic rendering of the largest datasets produced on supercomputers today, such as cosmologic simulations of the Universe and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations at unprecedented levels of detail. Paul also helps manage TACC's visualization systems, including Longhorn, the largest supercomputer in the world dedicated to VDA, and Stallion, the highest-resolution tiled display in the world. Paul received a B.S. in Computer Science, a B.A. in Plan II interdisciplinary honors, and an M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin. He will complete a Ph.D. in Computer Science from UT-Austin in August, 2010. Paul's research has been published in the IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics and his visualizations have appeared in The New York Times and Discover magazine.

Carlos Rosales
Dr. Carlos Rosales is a research associate in the High Performance Computing group at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC). He earned his Ph.D. degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Cranfield (UK) in 2003 and then spent six years working as part of the Institute of High Performance Computing in Singapore before moving to TACC. His current position involves the performance evaluation and optimization of scientific codes in multiple architectures, and his research interests include benchmarking techniques and efficient implementations of the Lattice Boltzmann Method for multiphase flows.

Le Yan
Dr. Le Yan is currently a scientific computing consultant in the High Performance Computing group at Louisiana Optical Network Initiative (LONI). He earned his Ph.D. degree in chemical engineering from Louisiana State University in 2005 with an emphasis on numerical simulation of multiphase flow in porous media. His current duties include supporting user activities on LONI supercomputers, maintaining software infrastructure on those machines, and teaching training classes on various HPC related topics.