Dr. Francine Berman

One of the two founding Principal Investigators of the National Science Foundation?s TeraGrid project, she also directed the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI), a consortium of 41 research groups, institutions, and university partners with the goal of building national infrastructure to support research and education in science and engineering. She has served on a broad spectrum of national and international leadership groups and committees including the National Science Foundation?s Engineering Advisory Committee, the National Institutes of Health?s NIGMS Advisory Committee, the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology Board of Trustees, and others. She is currently serving as co-Chair for the international Blue Ribbon Task Force for Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access. For her accomplishments, leadership, and vision, she was recognized as one of the top women in technology by BusinessWeek and Newsweek, and as one of the top technologists by IEEE Spectrum. She is Vice President for Research and Professor of Computer Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and is an international leader in the development of Cyberinfrastructure. She has written more than 165 articles, editorials, and reports spanning the areas of high-performance computing, grid computing, scheduling, programming environments and middleware, cyberinfrastructure, and digital data stewardship and preservation. She is also a Fellow of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) and Senior Member of the IEEE. From 2001 to 2009, she served as Director of the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), where she led a staff of 250+ interdisciplinary scientists, engineers, and technologists. SDSC is internationally known for its leadership in data-oriented science, technology, and Cyberinfrastructure, and its deep expertise in high performance computing and applications. As Director of SDSC, she led SDSC?s successful organization as a core cyberinfrastructure facility for the University of California while maintaining its leadership position as an international innovator in data cyberinfrastructure. Her work has had a major impact on the direction of computational science and the cyberinfrastructure that supports it. She was also Professor in the Computer Science and Engineering Department at UCSD and first holder of the High Performance Computing Chair in UCSD?s Jacobs School of Engineering. In 2008, she was named a ?Digital Preservation Pioneer? by the Library of Congress for her leadership and a vision that is ?both grand and rooted in reality?. She was also cited for her inspiring work as a teacher and mentor, and her service to the high-performance computing community.