Presenter

John Towns holds two appointments at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the Executive Associate Director for Engagement at NCSA (the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, http://www.ncsa.illinois.edu), and Deputy CIO for Research IT (http://researchit.illinois.edu) in the Office of the CIO at Illinois. He is also PI and Project Director for the NSF-funded XSEDE project (the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment, http://XSEDE.org). Towns provides leadership and direction in the development, deployment and operation of advanced computing resources and services in support of a broad range of research activities. In addition, he is the founding Chair of the Steering Committee of PEARC (Practice and Experience in Advanced Research Computing, http://www.pearc.org). He earned M.S. degrees in Physics and Astronomy from the University of Illinois and a B.S. in Physics from the University of Missouri-Rolla.