Danny Powell joins NCSA as Executive DirectorChampaign 25 October 2001 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 centre. Mr. Powell, an administrator with more than 15 years of experience managing academic IT research programmes, joins the NCSA staff November 1.
Mr. Powell will manage the day-to-day operations of NCSA and work to link NCSA staff and programmes with the National Computational Science Alliance and NCSA's Private Sector Programme. 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."
Danny 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 centres: 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 Mr. 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) programmes. 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).
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