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In this monthly feature, we’ll keep you up-to-date on the latest career developments for individuals in the high-performance computing community. Whether it’s a promotion, new company hire, or even an accolade, we’ve got the details. Check in each month for an updated list and you may even come across someone you know, or better yet, yourself!
Bruce Andrews and Christy Pambianchi
Intel Corp. welcomed Bruce H. Andrews as its corporate vice president and chief government affairs officer. Andrews will be responsible for overseeing Intel’s global government affairs group and the company’s government affairs and public policy functions and strategies.
Intel also welcomed Christy Pambianchi as its executive vice president and chief people officer. Pambianchi will head the human resources organization with the goal to attract, engage and retain the best talent. Before joining Intel, Pambianchi was executive vice president and chief human resources officer at Verizon.
Rick Arthur
Rick Arthur, senior director of computational methods research at GE Research, was appointed to the Department of Energy’s Advanced Scientific Computing Advisory Council. He will join a group of leaders in academia, industries and the National Labs in providing insight on scientific and technical matters related to the Department’s Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) program.
“The DOE has executed a persistent strategy to advance computing technologies and application capabilities crucial to national security, economic competitiveness, energy security and scientific discovery leadership,” Arthur said. “Government agencies have collaborated with industry and academic partners to propel the computational science and engineering workforce and ecosystem from the Gigascale of the 90’s through Terascale to today’s Petascale and the imminent Exascale – each leap in “scale” 1000x the capability of the prior.”
Francine Berman will join the University of Massachusetts Amherst’s College of Information and Computer Sciences faculty in the fall of 2021 as a research professor and Stuart Rice honorary chair. At UMass Amherst, Berman will lead a new initiative focusing on public-interest technology. She is a renowned data scientist, researcher, and co-founder of the Research Data Alliance.
“I love the mission of public universities,” said Berman. “I’m excited to join the UMass community, where social responsibility is at the forefront of so many people’s work, from students to faculty to leadership. And CICS, with its mission of computing for the common good, will be a wonderful new home.”
Donna A. Cox, professor in the School of Art and Design and director of the Advanced Visualization Lab Culture & Society Theme and Illinois eDream Institute National Center for the Supercomputing Applications University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, retires this month after building a 40-year legacy at NCSA.
“I can’t believe I lived this life. Whenever I reflect on it, remembering my mother and grandmother, I am touched and inspired to continue forward,” said Cox. “I met kind people who gave me opportunities to prove myself. Things could have been very different if I didn’t have these genuine connections with people, data, science, art, and technology. From being the only person in my whole family to get a high school degree to be one of two people in the world to do what I do, I feel truly blessed.”
John Coughlan
StorCentric, a provider of secure data management solutions, appointed John P. Coughlan as its chief financial officer. Before joining StorCentric, Coughlan held the CFO position at CoreBTS, a reseller of Cisco- and Microsoft-centric software, and Penthera Partners, an early-stage SaaS company.
“I am delighted to join StorCentric, a company that is redefining the data management and protection space,” said Coughlan. “I look forward to the opportunity to assist such an enviable world-class executive team in working across all areas of the company to generate ideas and implement strategies, create value and build revenue, and also importantly – ensure our partners enjoy unparalleled revenue opportunities, while our end customers enjoy dramatic and long-term ROI.”
Matt Demas joined GigaIO, the creators of datacenter rack-scale architecture for artificial intelligence and high-performance computing solutions, as its chief technical officer of its global sales unit. Demas comes to GigaIO from Liqid, a storage and composable solutions provider, where he served as field CTO.
In addition, Eric Oberhofer joined GigaIO as its vice president of its North American sales division. Oberhofer comes to GigaIO with 15 years of sales and business development experience. Most recently, he held the role of VP of the public sector at Liqid.
The Semiconductor Industry Association awarded Jensen Huang, founder and chief executive officer of Nvidia, the 2021 Robert N. Noyce Award. The Noyce Award is named in honor of semiconductor industry pioneer Robert N. Noyce, co-founder of Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel Corp.
“I am honored to receive the 2021 Noyce Award and do so on behalf of my colleagues at NVIDIA, whose body of work this award recognizes,” said Huang. “It has been the greatest joy and privilege to have grown up with the semiconductor and computer industries, two that so profoundly impact the world. As we enter the era of AI, robotics, digital biology, and the metaverse, we will see super-exponential technology advances. There’s never been a more exciting or important time to be in the semiconductor and computer industries.”
Raghib Hussain
Lightmatter appointed Raghib Hussain to its board of directors. Hussain currently serves as president of products and technologies at Marvell and brings to the board over 20 years of experience driving innovative commercial strategy in communications, security, networking, computing and semiconductor technologies.
“Lightmatter is an innovator of energy-efficient AI compute using silicon photonics,” said Hussain. “I’m honored to join the board and be a part of Lightmatter’s journey towards wide-scale adoption of this new paradigm in photonic compute solutions.”
Arthi Jayaraman
Arthi Jayaraman, centennial term professor for excellence in research and education at the University of Delaware, was selected to lead the new National Science Foundation research traineeship program (NRT). Jayaraman joined the University of Delaware in August 2014 as an associate professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering and materials science and engineering.
“[I’m] excited to lead the new NSF NRT interdisciplinary graduate training program combining polymers/soft materials, high performance computing, and data science,” said Jayaraman in a tweet. “We look forward to recruiting the first class of Ph.D. trainees this fall from the University of Delaware! Trainees will get to work with a dedicated NRT team with expertise in polymers, HPC, data science, & pedagogy…”
Daniel S. Katz was appointed as the inaugural steering committee chair of the Research Software Alliance. Currently, Katz is chief scientist at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and a research associate professor in Computer Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering, and the School of Information Sciences, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
“I’ve been working on increasing the recognition of research software and its dependence on the people who develop and maintain it for many years, as this is critical to improving research impacts,” said Katz. “I co-founded ReSA with Michelle Barker and Neil Chue Hong to enable the strategic coordination needed to maximize the achievement of community-wide goals, so I’m pleased to be able to expand my role in ReSA to help accomplish this, working with our fiscal sponsor, Code for Science & Society.”
Amit Pandey and Jonathan Martin
Amit Pandey joined WekaIO as its executive chairman. Pandey brings over 30 years of executive leadership experience having worked at Avi Networks, Zenprise (acquired by Citrix), Terracotta (acquired by Software AG), and NetApp. He will be responsible for overseeing the administrative and operational functions at Weka.
In addition, Jonathan Martin joined WekaIO as its president and will oversee Weka’s marketing, customer success, and global go-to-market initiatives. Martin has served as global chief marketing officer at Hitachi Vantara, Pure Storage (through IPO), and EMC (acquired by Dell), and has held executive roles at HP Software, Veritas Software, and Salesforce.
Mike Montez
Green Revolution Cooling appointed Mike Montez as its solutions architect for the company’s strategic alliances division. Montez comes to GRC from Hewlett Packard Enterprise, where he spent more than thirty years as a solutions architect and systems engineer.
“I am excited to be joining GRC, and am looking forward to helping implement their solutions throughout datacenters across the globe,” said Montez. “I have the skills needed to be able to connect with GRC’s Strategic Alliance Partners to continue solving the problem of energy consumption in datacenters.”
Rigetti Computing appointed Brian Sereda as its chief financial officer. Sereda brings to Rigetti Computing over 25 years of senior level finance experience, including approximately having prior CFO experience across different technology companies. Most recently, he served as CFO at Energous Corp.
“I am excited to join Rigetti and work alongside the team to help the company prosper,” Sereda said. “Quantum computing is such an innovative and increasingly critical technology that is pushing the boundaries of what is possible. Rigetti is a leader in the industry, and I look forward to being a part of the company’s next stage of growth.
King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) appointed Professor Jürgen Schmidhuber as director of the University’s Artificial Intelligence Initiative. Schmidhuber is a renowned computer scientist who is most noted for his pioneering work in the field of artificial intelligence, deep learning, and artificial neural networks. He will join KAUST on October 1, 2021.
“I am delighted that we are able to recruit to KAUST a seminal leader in AI and machine learning in Dr. Schmidhuber,” said KAUST President Tony Chan, himself a highly cited computer scientist and applied mathematician. “This signifies the commitment that KAUST, as well as Saudi Arabia, is making to lead in and contribute to this very important field.”
Devesh Tiwari
Devesh Tiwari, head of the Goodwill Computing Lab at Northeastern University, is the recipient of the 2020 Rising Star in Dependability award. Tiwari was recognized at the IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks “for fundamental and translational research contributions, impacting the reliability and efficiency of real-world computer systems.”
Tiwari is also an associate editor for Transactions of Parallel & Distributed Computing (TPDS), Transactions of Storage (ToS), and Journal of Parallel & Distributed Computing (JPDC). Before joining Northeastern, he served as a staff scientist at the United States Department of Energy Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
Dr. Didem Unat is the 2021 ACM SIGHPC Emerging Woman Leader in Technical Computing award winner. Dr. Unat is an assistant professor in the department of Computer Engineering at Koç University in Istanbul, Turkey. She is recognized for her innovative work in the field of programming models for data locality in High Performance and Scientific Computing, as well as her leadership role in the international HPC community.
The Emerging Woman Leader in Technical Computing award is unique in recognizing mid-career women in the technical and high performance computing communities.
John West
John E. West, director of strategic initiatives for the center operations and administration division at the Texas Advanced Computing Center, received the 2021 Computing in Science and Engineering Service Award. West was recognized for his work as CiSE associate editor in chief of departments.
Before joining TACC, West held numerous roles in the private and federal sectors, including serving as director of the Department of Defense High Performance Computing Modernization Program. West also served as general chair of SC16, which was held in Salt Lake City.
2021 New Frontiers Graduate Fellows
Rachel Flood Heaton from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Lucas Ford from North Carolina State University, Dale Forrister from the University of Utah, Deanna Nash from the University of California at Santa Barbara, and Adam Stewart from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign were selected as the 2021 New Frontiers Graduate Fellows.
The New Frontiers Initiative, in collaboration with the Blue Waters Project at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, launched the graduate fellowship program in the fall of 2013 to provide Ph.D. students with a year of support to advance their research. The program provides each fellow with a $38,000 stipend, up to $12,000 in tuition allowance, an allocation on the powerful Blue Waters petascale computing system, and funds to support travel to related meetings and conferences.
To read last month’s edition of Career Notes, click here.
Do you know someone that should be included in next month’s list? If so, send us an email at [email protected]. We look forward to hearing from you.
