NCSA Home
Contact Us | Intranet | Search

NCSA NEWS

News Home
Calendar
Images
Video on Demand
Subscribe to Our Newsletter
Frequently Asked Questions

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/.

 

Releases Archive