Danny Powell, Executive Director, NCSA

Danny Powell is the executive director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His interests include the management of large, interdisciplinary, inter-institutional, collaborative academic research and development programs, making use of computational, data and information technology resources. He worked at Rice University from 1987 to 2001, where together with Ken Kennedy he was responsible for creating and managing three major, national computational science collaborations (an NSF-funded Center for Research on Parallel Computation, CRPC; the multiple source funded Computer and Information Technology Institute, CITI; and the DARPA-funded Los Alamos Computer Science Institute, LACSI). In 2001, Powell moved to NCSA where he took over the day-to-day operations (business, financial, administrative), including oversight of the Private Sector Program, the international partnership programs, and governmental relations. He is on the board of directors (2009-) for the LSST Corporation (a non-profit organization overseeing the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope project). He is also a founding member and on the steering committee (2007 -) for the Advanced Research and Technology Collaboratory for the Americas (ARTCA), an organization formed to support and guide effective collaboration between universities, research centers, and industry in the interest of human and economic growth across South/Central/North America.