Danny Powell Joins NCSA as Executive Director
released
October 25, 2001
Contact
Karen Green
NCSA Public Information Officer
kareng@ncsa.uiuc.edu
217.265.0748 phone
217.244.7396 fax
CHAMPAIGN, IL The National Center for Supercomputing
Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
announced today that Danny Powell of Rice University in Houston is the new
executive director of the center.
Powell, an administrator with more than 15 years of experience managing
academic IT research programs, joins the NCSA staff Nov.1.
Powell will manage the day-to-day operations of NCSA and work to link NCSA
staff and programs with the National Computational Science Alliance
(Alliance) and NCSA's Private Sector Program. He will also act as NCSA's
day-to-day liaison with the University of Illinois, the National Science
Foundation, and the state of Illinois. He succeeds Jim Bottum, who left
NCSA last summer to become vice president for information technology and
chief information officer at Purdue University.
"Danny Powell is a proven leader with many years of experience managing
large interdisciplinary, multi-institutional research projects," said Dan
Reed, director of NCSA and the Alliance and chief architect for the new NSF
TeraGrid. "His experience, knowledge, creativity, and skill in dealing with
both people and budgets will be a tremendous asset to NCSA."
Powell most recently served as associate director at Rice's Los Alamos
Computer Science Institute and as the associate director for the Center for
High Performance Software Research, also at Rice. Before those positions,
Powell worked as associate director at two other Rice research centers: the
NSF Science and Technology Center for Research on Parallel Computation and
the Computer and Information Technology Institute. He was the business
manager for the Rice computer science department from 1987 to 1996 and ran
a computer-based engineering services company from 1983 to 1986.
"As someone who has been involved in technology research projects for many
years, I am thrilled to part of the NCSA team," said Powell. "NCSA is a
world leader in developing and deploying technologies that benefit science
and often change the world. I look forward to working with Dan Reed and
helping NCSA as it creates the future in information technology and
scientific computing."
Powell has been part of the Alliance, a nationwide partnership led by NCSA,
since its inception in 1997. He worked with the Alliance Partners for
Advanced Computational Services (PACS) with Alliance Education, Outreach,
and Training (EOT) programs. He was a member of the original PACS
management committee, the EOT organizing committee, and the NCSA ACCESS
Center advisory committee.
He belongs to the Association of University Technology Managers, the
National Council of University Research Administrators, and was Rice's
representative in the Texas Research Administration Managers and the
Coalition of Academic Supercomputer Centers (CASC).
The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is a leader in developing and
deploying cutting-edge high-performance computing, networking, and
information technologies. NCSA is a partner in the TeraGrid project, a
National Science Foundation initiative to build and deploy the world's
largest, fastest, most comprehensive, distributed infrastructure for open
scientific research. NCSA also leads the National Computational Science
Alliance (Alliance), a partnership to prototype an advanced computational
infrastructure for the 21st century that includes more than 50 academic,
government, and industry research partners. The NSF Partnerships for
Advanced Computational Infrastructure (PACI) program funds the Alliance. In
addition to the NSF, NCSA receives support from the state of Illinois, the
University of Illinois, private sector partners, and other federal
agencies. For more information, see http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/.
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