ARSC Appoints Visiting Chief Scientist

 

ARSC Appoints Visiting Chief Scientist

Submitted by Jenn Wagaman
Phone: (907) 474-6551

05/06/03

The Arctic Region Supercomputing Center has seized a unique opportunity to hire Professor George Lake as visiting chief scientist. Lake has built and continues in a distinguished career in computational science spanning astronomy, physics and bioinformatics. He is currently professor of astronomy and physics at the University of Washington. Prior to this position, he was a professor and chief information officer at the Institute for Systems Biology and member of the technical staff at the AT&T Bell Laboratories.

Over the course of Lake’s varied and interesting career, he was the project scientist for NASA’s High Performance Computing in Earth and Science project and on the scientific steering committee for NASA’s Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Lake is also the co-author of the white papers that started the Earth System Modeling Framework and the National Virtual Observatory, formerly the Digital Sky Project.

Lake will assume several major roles at ARSC over the term of his appointment. First, he will work to stimulate computational research in the scientific disciplines at the University of Alaska for which high performance computers are appropriate tools. By focusing directly on current scientific areas of emphasis for the center, such as bioinformatics and climate modeling, Lake will catalyze increased large-scale computational research by UA faculty and students. He will also serve as a magnet to attract applications of high performance computing to ARSC, thus extending the center’s national reputation for support of science beyond Alaska.

About ARSC

The Arctic Region Supercomputing Center, located on the campus of the University of Alaska Fairbanks, supports computational research in science and engineering with emphasis on high latitudes and the Arctic. The center provides high performance computational, visualization, networking and data storage resources for researchers within the University of Alaska, other academic institutions, the Department of Defense and other government agencies. ARSC is a Shared Resource Center in the Department of Defense’s High Performance Computing Modernization Program. For additional information about ARSC, go to www.arsc.edu .

CONTACT: ARSC Director Frank Williams, (907) 474-1106, williams@arsc.edu or George Lake, ARSC Chief Scientist, (907) 474-5953.

ARSC news releases are also available on the web at www.arsc.edu .