TEXAS ADVANCED COMPUTING CENTER - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- Business Systems Program Manager / Enterprise Software
- Enterprise Software
For the last 29+ years Adam has held leadership and software development roles in industry and academia. His roles have spanned a wide range of engineering domains including CFD, CPU design, tactical data communications, SONAR, combat systems, and instrumentation manufacturing for aerospace and nuclear power applications.
Dr. Ruhela joined the HPC group at TACC in January 2020. Before TACC, he was working in the Network-Based Computing Laboratory at The Ohio State University. He has more than 17 years of R&D experience in HPC, Social Computing, and Telecommunication. He is currently working on novel designs and algorithms in parallel communication to deliver the best performance and scalability for scientific and engineering applications. He has also conducted large scalability studies and performance evaluations of HPC applications on leading supercomputers.
Dr. Ruhela received his Ph.D. degree from IIT Delhi and B.Tech degree from NIT Kurukshetra, both in Computer Science. He has worked closely with researchers from The Ohio State University, NICTA Australia (now called Data61), IIT-D, and C-DOT Delhi. He has worked with computational scientists and researchers from TACC, SDSC, OSC, UMH, LLNS, University of Oregon, NCAR, and EPFL on NSF and XSEDE proposals.
Job Titles:
- Communications, Media, & Design
Job Titles:
- Center Operations & Administration
Job Titles:
- Center Operations & Administration
Job Titles:
- Communications, Media & Design
Dr. Carol Fletcher is Director of EPIC (Expanding Pathways in Computing) at UT Austin's Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) where she oversees research and professional development projects in STEM and CS education such as the nationally recognized WeTeach_CS program. She is PI for two NSF projects focused on broadening participation in computing (BPC), the Expanding Computing Education Pathways (ECEP) Alliance and Accelerating Women's Success and Mastery in CS (AWSM in CS). Her research interests include BPC and measuring large scale professional development in STEM.
Carol is a former middle school teacher and an elected Pflugerville ISD School Board Trustee from 2001 to 2019. Her experiences as a teacher, policymaker, and researcher bridge the gap between education, workforce, and policy. Additional leadership roles include Chair of the Texas Computer Science Task Force, CS4TX Steering Committee, the TEA's STEM Educator Standards & IT Industry Advisory Committees, and numerous NSF funded STEM education grant advisory boards.
Job Titles:
- Executive Director
- Associate Vice President for Research
- Associate Vice President for Research at the University
- Associate Vice President for Research, UT Austin
Dr. Dan Stanzione, Associate Vice President for Research at The University of Texas at Austin since 2018 and Executive Director of the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) since 2014, is a nationally recognized leader in high performance computing.
He is the principal investigator (PI) for several projects including a multimillion-dollar National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to acquire and deploy Frontera, which will be the fastest supercomputer at a U.S. university. Stanzione is also the PI of TACC's Stampede2 and Wrangler systems, supercomputers for high performance computing and for data-focused applications, respectively. He served for six years as the co-director of CyVerse, a large-scale NSF life sciences cyberinfrastructure in which TACC is a major partner. In addition, Stanzione was a co-principal investigator for TACC's Ranger and Lonestar supercomputers, large-scale NSF systems previously deployed at UT Austin.
Stanzione received his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering and his master's degree and doctorate in computer engineering from Clemson University, where he later directed the supercomputing laboratory and served as an assistant research professor of electrical and computer engineering.
Job Titles:
- Center Operations & Administration
Job Titles:
- Director, Special Projects
Job Titles:
- Education & Outreach Directorate
Job Titles:
- Communications, Media, & Design
Job Titles:
- Manager, HPC Performance & Architectures / Research Associate
Ian joined TACC as a Research Associate in the Performance and Architecture Group in 2018. Currently, he focuses on system performance analysis and industry standard benchmarking on HPC platforms as well as assisting TACC users with the porting, analysis, and improvement of their research software. Prior to joining TACC, he held a position at the Center for Research in Extreme Scale Technologies (CREST) at Indiana University where he worked on asynchronous multi-tasking runtime system development and RDMA networking library integration. He also worked as a Research Geophysicist at the Indiana Geological and Water Survey where he involved the collaborative development of a science gateway for simulation and assessment of CO2 capture and storage technologies with Los Alamos National Lab and Pervasive Technology Institute.
Job Titles:
- Research Campus, Building 205
Job Titles:
- Life Sciences Computing Directorate
James investigates the spatial organization of biological signals. Research includes: inventing computational approaches for mapping the spatial distribution of genes in organs; modeling the relationship between shape and function of the lung across species; and developing tools for real-time imaging and data analysis using high performance computing. James has multidisciplinary training at Rice University and Baylor College of Medicine that spans engineering, computer science, biology, and medicine. He joined TACC in 2013 after spending time at the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. At TACC, James continues work to strengthen the interactions between high performance computing and life science research.
Janet began at TACC in 1986 and serves as the Director of Center Operations & Administration. She is responsible for budget management, UT accounting, hardware and software negotiations, human resources, and proposal management. Prior to joining TACC, Janet worked at the Research and Development Center for Teacher Education.
Jennifer received her doctoral and master degrees in Computer Science and Engineering from University of California San Diego, where she worked with Fran Berman. She currently oversees the NSF Engagement and Performance Operations Center. Prior to joining TACC, she was director of the International Networks Program at Indiana University. She has also spent time as an NSF program officer, a senior staff member for Globus, and a program director at the IEEE Computer Society. She has held research appointments at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, the University of Edinburgh, the University of Chicago, and Northwestern University.
At TACC, she will be responsible for promoting collaborations enabled through data networks within the region and with other national or international collaborations, with a strong emphasis on supporting use of the Texas networks (OTS and LEARN).
Joe Allen joined the TACC Life Sciences Computing Group in 2015 where he works to advance computational biology and bioinformatics research at UT system academic and health institutions. His research experience spans a range of disciplines from computer-aided drug design to wet lab biochemistry. He is also interested in exploring new ways high performance computing resources can be used to answer challenging biological questions. Before joining TACC, Joe earned a B.S. in Chemistry from the University of Jamestown (2006), and a Ph.D. in Biochemistry from Virginia Tech (2011).
Job Titles:
- High Peformance Computing Directorate
Job Titles:
- Director, Special Projects
John Fonner earned a Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, where he used a blend of experimental and computational techniques to study binding interactions between peptides and conducting polymers for implant applications in the nervous system. He joined the Life Sciences Computing group at TACC in 2011 and has served on a number of projects that help life sciences researchers leverage advanced computing resources, both through training and through the development of better tools and cyberinfrastructure.
Job Titles:
- Director of Strategic Initiatives
- Director, Leadership Computing
John West is Director of Strategic Initiatives at the Texas Advanced Computing Center, based at the University of Texas at Austin. TACC provides advanced computational services and expertise to the open science community, and is the largest provider of supercomputing resources in the NSF cyberinfrastructure community. Prior to joining TACC, he was Director of the Department of Defense High Performance Computing Modernization Program, a multi-hundred million dollar (annual) DOD-wide program that provides computational expertise, supercomputers, and a national research network for the Defense acquisition, science, engineering, and test communities. Prior to that he held positions in private industry and the federal government, with responsibilities in computational modeling and high-performance infrastructure. He also founded the technical news site insideHPC.com, achieving 1.5 million pageviews per month before he sold it three years after launch; the company remains successful and has grown to include other sites.
West was recognized with the Department of the Army's R&D Award. He was a founding officer of the ACM Special Interest Group on High Performance Computing (SIGHPC) and now serves as its chair. He is past chair of the High End Computing working group of the National IT R&D Subcommittee of the National Science and Technology Council's (NSTC) Committee on Technology, a former Associate Editor in Chief of IEEE Computational Science and Engineering, and founding co-chair of the ACM Diversity and Inclusion Council. A Distinguished Fellow of the Bagley College of Engineering at Mississippi State University, he has served on planning and review boards for universities, the National Science Foundation, and a number of federal agencies.
Job Titles:
- Admin
- Member of the Center Operations & Administration
Katie Cohen is a member of the Center Operations & Administration team. Katie's key areas of responsibility include financial analysis and human resource services. She assists the Director of Operations & Administration with budget management, UT accounting, and proposal management. Katie is also the key point of contact for recruitment, hiring, and new employee paperwork. Katie holds a degree in Business Administration, and previously worked at the Texas Tech High Performance Computing Center.
Kelly joined TACC as Associate Director in September 2001 and then served as the Director of Visualization. Currently, she is the Director of Health Analytics at TACC and Associate Professor, Department of Women's Health at the Dell Medical School, UT Austin. She received her doctoral degree in Computational Engineering from Mississippi State University in May 2000, and received her masters and bachelors degrees in Computer Science from Texas A&M University in 1992 and 1988 respectively. She has over thirty refereed publications in fields ranging from Computational Mechanics to Supercomputing Applications to Scientific Visualization. She has given a number of invited talks and has actively participated in conferences related to her field.
Job Titles:
- Broadening Participation in Computing Institutional Initiatives Directorate
Job Titles:
- User Services Administration
Job Titles:
- Research Engineer in the HPC Performance and Architectures Group
- Research Engineering / Scientist Associate IV
Matthew Cawood is a Research Engineer in the HPC Performance and Architectures Group at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), University of Texas at Austin. He is primarily focused on performance benchmarking and analysis of HPC hardware and software technologies, optimizing scientific applications, as well as developing tools and frameworks. Prior to joining TACC in 2020, Matthew conducted similar research at the Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC) in South Africa, with over 10 years of technical experience in HPC and related fields.
Job Titles:
- Advanced Computing Interfaces Directorate
- Director of Advanced Computing Interfaces
Maytal Dahan is the Director of Advanced Computing Interfaces overseeing the Web and Mobile Applications and the Cloud and Interactive Computing groups at TACC. Her teams support a wide variety of scientists and researchers across multiple domains including natural hazards, epidemiology, humanities, plenary science to create solutions that help them achieve scientific advancement by developing web portals, APIs, and interfaces to help solve problems with novel and innovative solutions to advance cyberinfrastructure.
Maytal started her career as a computer science graduate and became a software developer and individual contributor to software projects, joining TACC in August 2002. Prior to TACC, she worked at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) in the Grid Portals Architecture Group.
She is currently PI/co-PI on multiple NSF projects such as - POSE: Phase I: Tapis Advancing Collaborative Open Source, Project Tapis: Next Generation Software for Distributed Research, SGX3 - A Center of Excellence to Extend Access, Expand the Community, and Exemplify Good Practices for CI Through Science Gateways.
With over 20 years of professional software engineering, management, and leadership experience, Maytal is passionate about making science more accessible to the masses and using cutting edge web technologies to lower the barrier of entry into scientific discovery. Her goal is to make tech a more inclusive and welcoming environment to folks of all backgrounds and experiences and create a tech culture that is a place where everyone can find a place.
Maytal has a Bachelors of Science in Computer Science from the University of California, San Diego and a Masters in Software Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin.
Job Titles:
- Industrial Programs Director / Industry
Melyssa Fratkin joined TACC in July 2006. As Industrial Programs Director, she oversees TACC's corporate partnerships and government relations activities. Melyssa focuses on developing and managing strong collaborations between industry and academia with the Science & Technology Affiliates for Research (STAR) program.
Melyssa is the founding co-chair of Texas Women in HPC, an organization aimed at raising awareness and broadening diversity in HPC by supporting women and under-represented populations in high performance computing in industry, academia and government across the state of Texas. She also serves as Vice President of the AMD HPC User Group, and Communications Coordinator of the ACM Special Interest Group on High Performance Computing (SIGHPC).
Natalie is a Project Manager for the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC). She joined TACC from the Ohio Supercomputer Center in July 2008.
As a member of the Project Management team she works on new project proposals and provides project management support for Stampede2 - the flagship supercomputer at TACC, DesignSafe - the Cyberinfrastructure component of the Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure (NHERI) and Frontera - the NSF-funded petascale computing system.
Job Titles:
- Information Security
- Manager, Networking, Security & Operations / Senior Network Engineer
Job Titles:
- Director, Strategic Technologies
Niall Gaffney's background primarily revolves around the management and utilization of large inhomogeneous scientific datasets. Niall, who earned his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees in astronomy from The University of Texas at Austin, joined TACC in May 2013. Most of his focus has been on creating environments to foster better data practices from improving metadata, data processing, analysis, and reuse. He focuses on improving researchers' data practices to accelerate outcomes and better feed the Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence applications which are becoming more broadly adopted in science and engineering research fields. Much of this stems from his 13 years as designer and developer for the archives at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), which holds the data from the Hubble Space Telescope, Kepler, and James Webb Space Telescope missions.
He was also a leader in developing the Hubble Legacy Archive. This project harvested the 20+ years of Hubble Space Telescope data to create some of the most sensitive astronomical data products available for open research. Before his work at STScI, Niall was worked as "the friend of the telescope" for the Hobby Eberly Telescope (HET) project at the McDonald Observatory in west Texas. This was the start of his work in planning experiments and then cataloging the data the HET produced.
Job Titles:
- Director of Strategic Technologies
Paul Navrátil is the Director of Strategic Technologies at TACC, a research scientist at The University of Texas at Austin, and faculty for the Plan II interdisciplinary honors program. As director of Strategic Technologies, he leads a team tasked with imagining the scientific workflows of 2030 and beyond, encompassing hardware, software, data, analysis and UI/UX needs; developing TACC strategy to address those needs; and implementing transformative projects to achieve that vision.
Previously, Navrátil was Director of the Visualization area at TACC, where his research interests included efficient algorithms for large-scale parallel visualization and data analytics (VDA) and innovative design for large-scale VDA systems, with particular focus on in-situ, high-fidelity visualization techniques. His recent work includes software-defined visualization capabilities, particularly the NSF-funded GraviT project, the DOE-funded Galaxy project, and the Intel supported SpRay project, which all enable large-scale distributed-memory ray tracing in various forms. This work enables photo-realistic rendering of the largest datasets produced on supercomputers today. He also developed and still maintains the TACC Analysis Portal.
Navrátil also teaches TC 310: Applied Logic and Reasoning through Programming and Data Analysis for the Plan II interdisciplinarity honors program in the College of Liberal Arts UT Austin. This course provides students with a foundation for self-education and exploration in the rich Python software ecosystem as well as experience with fundamental concepts in artificial intelligence (particularly neural networks) and the deeper implications for society and our own concept of humanity.
Education
Ph.D. Computer Science
University of Texas at Austin
M.S. Computer Science
University of Texas at Austin
B.S. Computer Science
University of Texas at Austin
B.A. Plan II
University of Texas at Austin
Job Titles:
- Center Operations & Administration
Job Titles:
- Computational Health & Medicine Initiatives Directorate
Radek Bukowski came to Texas Advanced Computing Center from Dell Medical School, where he was a tenured professor and Vice-Chair for Research at the Department of Women's Health. He is Affiliate Faculty Member of the Oden Institute, and Honorary Senior Visiting Fellow at Cambridge University.
He received an MD from Poznan University of Medical Sciences in 1986 and a Ph.D. from Freie Universitaet Berlin in 1994. He completed training in obstetrics and gynecology in Europe and the US. In 1994, he completed a Research Fellowship in Reproductive Endocrinology at the Howard and Georgeanna Jones Institute for Reproductive Medicine under the mentorship of Gary Hodgen, Georgeanna, and Howard Jones. After completing a Fellowship in Maternal Fetal Medicine at the University of Texas Medical Branch, Dr. Bukowski joined its faculty, rising through the ranks over 17 years and becoming a tenured professor. Yale University then recruited him to become a Professor of obstetrics, gynecology, and reproductive sciences, Director of the Division of Maternal-Fetal Medicine at the Yale School of Medicine, and Chief of Maternal-Fetal Medicine at the Yale-New Haven Hospital.
Over more than 30 years, Dr. Bukowski's research contributed substantially to obstetrics, human development, computational medicine, and decision-making. His research was supported by multiple grants from NIH and NSF and culminated in a number of high-impact publications. He is the associate editor for computational medicine of the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, the leading journal in the field in the world.
Job Titles:
- Communications, Media & Design
Job Titles:
- Education & Outreach Directorate
Rosalia joined TACC in July 2011. She leads education and outreach activities that expand understanding and appreciation of the value of high performance computing and the career opportunities available in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields, particularly among underrepresented populations.
Previously, Rosalia worked as the Director of MEDPEP, administered by the Center for the Study of Latino Health and Culture at the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine, and at Cerritos College in Southern California. In these positions, she developed initiatives that boosted Latina/o/x participation in medicine and the health sciences throughout the California community college system.
Job Titles:
- Communications, Media & Design
Job Titles:
- Center Operations & Administration
Smruti joined the TACC Cloud and Interactive Computing Group in 2018, where she builds scalable distributed system software and middleware to enable distributed computational science experiments. Prior to joining TACC, she held academic positions at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her research and software development areas include distributed systems, formal verification, cloud computing, data science, cyberinfrastructure, software-defined networking, and reproducible research. Smruti has received the Ph.D. degree in computer science and engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, India.
Job Titles:
- Communications, Media & Design
Job Titles:
- User Services Administration
Job Titles:
- Scientist
- Engineering Scientist in the HPC Performance and Architectures Group
Stephen Lien Harrell joined TACC in 2020 as an Engineering Scientist in the HPC Performance and Architectures Group at the Texas Advanced Computing Center. He is primarily focused on benchmarking tools and infrastructure for performance analysis. Previously, Stephen spent more than 6 years as a Senior Computational Scientist in the Research Computing group and 6 years before that in the HPC Systems group at Purdue. Stephen has been involved in reproducibility efforts at the SC conference series and is the chair for the ACM SIGHPC Computational and Data Science Fellowship.
Job Titles:
- Communications, Media & Design
Job Titles:
- Research Scientist
- Decision Support Systems
- Research Scientist With the
Suzanne A. Pierce, PhD, is a Research Scientist with the Texas Advanced Computing Center and Environmental Science Institute in the Jackson School of Geosciences. Dr. Pierce leads an NSF-funded community of researchers using intelligent systems to understand Earth, including water, energy, urbanization, and ecosystem services (IS-GEO.org). Results from her research develop tools and techniques that aid integrated modeling and group decision support. She's received awards both locally and internationally for innovation and engagement.
Job Titles:
- Director of User Services
- User Services Directorate
Tim Cockerill is TACC's Director of User Services. He oversees the allocations process by which computing time and storage is awarded on TACC's HPC systems. The User Services team is also responsible for user account management, training, and user guides. Tim also currently serves as the DesignSafe Deputy Project Director, providing a web-based platform supporting natural hazards research. Tim is co-PI on two NSF CC* awards providing training and research support for underserved/under-resourced universities and community colleges. Tim joined TACC in January, 2014, as the Director of Center Programs responsible for program and project management across the Center's portfolio of awards. Prior to joining TACC, he was the Associate Project Director for XSEDE and the TeraGrid Project Manager. Before entering the world of high performance computing in 2003, Tim spent 10 years working in startup companies aligned with his research interests in gallium arsenide materials and semiconductor lasers. Prior to that, Tim earned his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and was a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department.
Job Titles:
- Advanced Computing Systems Directorate
Job Titles:
- Director, Leadership Computing
Job Titles:
- Center Operations & Administration