Dr. Danny Allen Reed,
Director Renaissance Computing Institute
Daniel A. Reed is the Director of the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI), a major collaborative venture of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Duke University, North Carolina State University, and the state of North Carolina. RENCI focuses on finding solutions to complex, multidisciplinary problems and on exploring the interactions of computing technology with the sciences, arts and humanities.
Dr. Reed also is the Chancellor's Eminent Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and serves as the Chancellor's Senior Advisor for Strategy and Innovation. Dr. Reed's research focuses on the design and performance optimization of very high-speed computers and on providing new computing capabilities for scholars in science, medicine, engineering and the humanities.
Dr. Reed is a current member of President George W. Bush's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) and a former member of the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC). Both committees are charged with providing advice on science and information technology issues and challenges to the President. As a member of PCAST, he co-chaired the group that produced the 2007 assessment of the U.S. computing research portfolio, Leadership Under Challenge: Information Technology R&D in a Competitive World. As a member of PITAC, he chaired the group that produced the 2005 report, Computational Science: Ensuring America's Competitiveness. He is also Chair of the Board of Directors of the Computing Research Association (CRA), which represents the interests of the major academic computing departments and industrial research laboratories in North America.
He was previously Head of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). He was Director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at UIUC from 2000-2004, where he was Chief Architect of the National Science Foundation's TeraGrid, a nationwide open computing infrastructure for science and engineering research, and he led the National Computational Science Alliance, a consortium of roughly 50 academic institutions and national laboratories that developed next-generation software infrastructure for scientific computing. He received his PhD in computer science in 1983 from Purdue University.