H. Edward Seidel, senior vice president of research and innovation at the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology in Moscow, has been named the director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, pending the approval of its board of trustees.
Seidel led NCSA’s numerical relativity group from 1991 to 1996, and was among the original co-principal investigators on the Blue Waters supercomputing project at Illinois.
In 2008, Seidel joined the National Science Foundation, where he was assistant director for mathematical and physical sciences from 2009 to 2012, overseeing a budget of more than $1.4 billion. He also served as the director of the office of cyberinfrastructure at the NSF.
'Dr Seidel is a world-renowned researcher in high-performance computing and relativity and astrophysics, and he has an outstanding track record as a researcher and administrator,' said Peter Schiffer, the vice chancellor for research at the University of Illinois.
'He has held a national leadership role at the NSF, which will give him a great perspective on emerging directions in science and engineering and on the federal funding climate.'
Seidel, whose expected starting date at NCSA will be 15 January 2014, will succeed Thom Dunning, a University of Illinois chemistry professor who announced his retirement from NCSA last year. Dunning has been in charge of NCSA for eight years.
