Speaker Bios:

Anitescu, Mihai
Computational Mathematician and Fellow of the Computation Institute - Argonne National Laboratory

Benson, Hande
Associate Professor of Decision Sciences - Drexel University

Brenner, Donald
Professor of Computational Material Science - North Carolina State University

Cohen, Andrew
Assistant Professor - University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee

Eckstein, Jonathan
Professor - Rutgers University

Feng, Wu
Associate Professor of Comp Sci & Eelectrical & Computer Engineering - Virginia Tech

Haratsch, Erich Franz
Technical Manager - LSI Corporation

Gao, Yan
Director-Pricing/Risk Analytics - PPL

Giles, C. Lee
Penn State University

Glimm, James
Stony Brook University

Glynn, Peter
Stanford University

Grinberg, Leopold
Senior Research Associate - Brown University

Haimovich, Alexander
Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering- Rutgers University

Haratsch, Erich Franz
LSI Corporation

Hirsh, Haym
Professor of Computer Science - Rutgers University

Hummer, Gerhard
Chief, Theoretical Biophysics Section - National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases

Kohlmeyer, Axel
Temple University

Lee, John
Research Staff Member - IBM Research

Lyrintis, Anastasios
Perdue University

Mitran, Sorin
Associate Professor- University of North Carolina

Mlasgar, Joseph
Manager of Energy Management Systems (EMS) - PPL Corporation

Muñoz, José L.
Director, Office of Cyberinfrastructure - National Science Foundation

Obradovic, Zoran
Temple University

Parashar, Manish
Rutgers University

Peng, Hanchuan
Senior Computer Scientist - Howard Hughes Medical Institute

Peterson, Brian
Team Lead for Computational Chemistry - Air Products and Chemicals

Polansky, Walter
Office of Science, DOE

Ramshaw, Lance
Lead Scientist - BBN

Rötteler, Martin
Research Staff Member - NEC Labs

Singh, Mona
Associate Professor - Princeton University

Vanderbei, Robert
Chair and Professor of Operations Research and Financial Engineering - Princeton University

Yang, Lin
Assistant Professor - UMDNJ-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School




Anitescu, Mihai (website)
Computational Mathematician and Fellow of the Computation Institute
Argonne National Laboratory

Dr. Anitescu has obtained his Engineer (M.Sc.) Diploma in electrical engineering from the Polytechnic University of Bucharest in 1992 and his Ph.D. degree in applied mathematical and computational sciences from the University of Iowa in 1997. Between 1997 and 1999 he was the Wilkinson fellow in computational science in the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at Argonne National Laboratory. Between 1999 and 2002 he was an assistant professor of mathematics at the University of Pittsburgh, where he is currently an adjunct associate professor. Since 2002, he has been a Computational Mathematician in the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at Argonne National Laboratory. Currently, he is a professor in the Department of Statistics at the University of Chicago. Dr. Anitescu is a Senior Editor for Optimization Methods and Software and a member of the editorial boards of Mathematical Programming series A and series B. In 2009, Dr. Anitescu is a member of the Organizing Committees of the SIAM Annual Meeting and of the International Symposium on Mathematical Programming. He is the author of more than 60 papers in scholarly journals and conference proceedings, on numerical optimization, numerical analysis, computational mathematics and their application.

Benson, Hande
Associate Professor of Decision Sciences
Drexel University

Dr. Hande Benson is an Associate Professor of Decision Sciences at Drexel University's LeBow College of Business. Prior to joining Drexel University, she was on the faculty of Mathematics at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis. Dr. Benson received her doctorate from Princeton University's program in Operations Research and Financial Engineering in 2001 under the supervision of Dr. Robert J. Vanderbei. Dr. Benson's research interests lie in the field of nonlinear programming, particularly in using interior-point methods to solve large-scale optimization problems. She is a member of the team that develops the LOQO nonlinear solver. Her recent work has focused on using interior-point methods and LOQO to solve mixed-integer nonlinear programming problems.

Brenner, Donald (website)
Professor of Computational Material Science
North Carolina State University

Donald Brenner is a Kobe Steel Distinguished Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at North Carolina State University. He received his Ph.D. in Chemistry from the Pennsylvania State University in 1987, after which he joined the Theoretical Chemistry Section at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory as a staff scientist. In 1994 Prof. Brenner left the NRL to join the NC State faculty, where his research interests have focused on the development and application of atomic and multi-scale modeling methods for the virtual design of new materials for a wide variety of applications. His current research focuses on multiscale modeling of metal contacts under high electromagnetic stress; friction, wear and multiscale lubrication; nanometer-scale plasticity and chemical dynamics in metal alloys and energetic materials at high strain rates/shock loading; structure, stabilization and mechanical properties of nano-crystalline materials; design of nano-thermites for controlled energy release and sensitivity; and functionalized nanoparticles and polymer-based smart nano-structures for mitigation of bio-hazards and toxins.

Cohen, Andrew
Assistant Professor
University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee

Andrew Cohen is an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He received his Ph.D. from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in May of 2008. Dr. Cohen was previously employed as a software design engineer in the operating systems group at Microsoft where he designed systems software for high performance graphics and networking, as a microprocessor product engineer at Intel Corp., and as a software engineer at Maptrails Inc. where he designed GIS software for portable devices. Dr. Cohen is a member of the IEEE.

Eckstein, Jonathan
Professor
Rutgers University

Jonathan Eckstein is a Professor in the department of Management Science and Information Systems at Rutgers University. His principle research interests are in numerical optimization algorithms, both continuous and discrete, and especially their parallel implementation. Areas of particular focus include augmented Lagrangian/proximal methods, and branch-and-bound algorithms. He has also worked in applying operations research techniques to problems in information systems. He completed his Ph.D. in Operations Research at MIT in 1989, and then taught at Harvard Business School for two years. He then spent four years in the Mathematical Sciences Research Group of Thinking Machines, Inc., before joining Rutgers.

Feng, Wu
Associate Professor of Comp Sci & Eelectrical & Computer Engineering
Virginia Tech

Dr. Wu-chun Feng — or more simply, "Wu" — is an associate professor of computer science and electrical & computer engineering at Virginia Tech, where he directs the Systems, Networking, and Renaissance Grokking Laboratory. His research interests span many areas of high-performance networking and computing from hardware to applications software. To the computer science and engineering community, he is perhaps best known for his systems-level research in high-performance networking, ranging from systems-area network architectures such as Quadrics and 10-Gigabit Ethernet (10GigE) to wide-area network frameworks and implementations in support of distributed computing such as adaptive flow control for TCP (i.e., DRS: Dynamic Right-Sizing) and hybrid circuit- and packet-switched networks (i.e., CHEETAH: Circuit-switched High-speed End-to-End Transport ArcHitecture) and the autonomic rate-adaptive protocols that run on them.

Haratsch, Erich Franz
Technical Manager
LSI Corporation

Dr. Erich F. Haratsch received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the Technical University of Munich, Germany. From 1997 to 2001 he was with Bell Labs Research in Holmdel, New Jersey, USA working on equalizer and decoder architectures for Gigabit Ethernet over copper. From 2001 to 2007 he worked for Agere Systems in Allentown, Pennsylvania, USA, where he developed read channel architectures for magnetic recording. Since 2007 he has been a Technical Manager in the Read Channel IP Development Organization at LSI Corporation in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Dr. Haratsch is an author of more than 20 IEEE papers, and he is an inventor of more than 15 U.S. patents. Dr. Haratsch is a Senior Member of IEEE.

Grinberg, Leopold
Senior Research Associate
Brown University

Dr. Grinberg received his M.Sc in Mechanical Engineering from Ben-Gurion University, Israel (2003) and his Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from Brown University, USA (2009). He is currently a Senior Research Associate in the Division of Applied Mathematics at Brown University. His research interests include developing methods for parallel computing, spectral element methods, and multiscale blood flow simulations. He is the recipient of Fulbright Award (2003) and The Best Poster Award, Supercomputing '08.

Haimovich, Alexander
Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Rutgers University

Alex Haimovich is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. He served as the Director of the New Jersey Center for Wireless Telecommunications from 2003 to 2005. He got the PhD degree in Systems from University of Pennsylvania, and the B.Sc. in electrical engineering from the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology. He has been at NJIT since 1992. Prior to that, he served in various capacities in the industry. His current research interests are MIMO radar, source location, and communication over wireless networks.

Hirsh, Haym
Professor of Computer Science at
Rutgers University

Haym Hirsh is Professor of Computer Science at Rutgers University and is currently serving as Director of the Division of Information and Intelligent Systems at the National Science Foundation. His research is on foundations and applications of machine learning, data mining, and information retrieval. He received his BS degree from the Mathematics and Computer Science Departments at UCLA and his MS and PhD degrees from the Computer Science Department at Stanford University.

Hummer, Gerhard (website)
Chief, Theoretical Biophysics Section
National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases
National Institutes of Health

Gerhard Hummer, chief of the Theoretical Biophysics Section for the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, earned a Ph.D. from the University of Vienna (Aus.) in 1992. The main objective of his research is to understand the stability, dynamics, and function of biomolecules and their complexes using computational and theoretical methods, in close collaboration with experimental groups. Major emphasis is placed on the role of water and ions in biomolecular systems, and in particular on hydrophobic and electrostatic effects. Focus areas include theory of single-molecule experiments; channel function; peptide and protein folding; complex formation and ligand binding; proton pumping and bioenergetics; reaction-rate calculations; and the development of new methods for biomolecular simulation and electrostatics.

Lee, John (website)
Research Staff Member
IBM Research

Jon Lee is a Research Staff member at the IBM TJ Watson Research Center, where he manages the Mathematical Programming group. His current research focus is on nonlinear discrete optimization, including MINLP (mixed-integer nonlinear programming). Jon has over 75 publications, he has been involved in the development of the COIN-OR projects Bonmin (for MINLP) and Couenne (for global optimization), and he is author of "A First Course in Combinatorial Optimization," Cambridge University Press. Jon is currently Chair of the Executive Committee of the Mathematical Programming Society, an Associate Editor of the journal Discrete Applied Mathematics, an Adjunct Professor at New York University (since '02), a Permanent Member of DIMACS, and a Full Member of the COIN-OR Foundation. Jon received his Ph.D. in Operations Researchh ('86) from Cornell University. He has been a faculty member at Yale University and the University of Kentucky, and he has held visiting fellowships at CORE (Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium) for '91-'92 and '99-'00.

Mitran, Sorin
Associate Professor
University of North Carolina

Sorin Mitran has a doctoral of engineering from the Politehnica University Bucharest. Dr. Mitran’s positions have included Politehnica University Aerospace Engineering Dept. (1995-98), the Karlsruhe Research Center (1998-99), the University of Washington Applied Mathematics Dept. (1999-2002) and recently at the University of North Carolina Applied Mathematics. Research interests include multiscale simulation, continuum-microscopic interaction algorithms, viscoelastic flow.

Mlasgar, Joseph
Manager of Energy Management Systems (EMS)
PPL Corporation

Joseph Mlasgar is the Manager of the Energy Management Systems (EMS) support team in the Information Solutions Department at PPL Corporation. He oversees the full spectrum of EMS systems support throughout PPL, including its generation and transmission management systems. In addition, he oversees the support for the PI Historians, Interfaces to the Independent System Operators, and Market Trading systems. He also oversees PPL’s interfaces to the numerous PPL plant systems. Joe has spent his whole career at PPL and has been previously involved with the nuclear side of the business in the design/Implementation of the various control systems and the training simulator for the plant. He has also been involved in the design/implementation of the PPL power plant digital control systems. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from Lehigh University and is a registered Professional Engineer. Joe is also a member of the PJM (ISO) Systems Information Subcommittee which is responsible for defining and overseeing the appropriate rules for real-time process systems with the PJM territory for utilities and plants.

Muñoz, José L.
Director, Office of Cyberinfrastructure
National Science Foundation

José L. Muñoz is Acting Director of the National Science Foundation's Office of Cyberinfrastructure (OCI). OCI has four major activities that support its mission for cross-directorate support in cyberinfrastructure: high performance computing; data and visualization; virtual organizations and; learning and workforce development. Muñoz previously served as deputy director and director of OCI, and prior to that as director of the Simulation and Computer Science Office at the National Nuclear Security Administration's Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASCI) program. In this position, he was responsible for software development environments. As program manager and assistant director of DARPA's Information Technology Office, he led activities in embedded computing, adaptive computing, and data-intensive computing. He has several publications and one patent in the area of high-performance sonar/signal processing.

Peng, Hanchuan
Senior Computer Scientist
Howard Hughes Medical Institute

Hanchuan Peng is currently a senior computer scientist and the head of a computational bioimage analysis lab at Janelia Farm Research Campus, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, after finishing research at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, UC Berkeley, on computational biology, bioinformatics, and high performance data mining, and Johns Hopkins University Medical School on human brain imaging and analysis. Dr. Peng is a leading researcher in the field of bioimage informatics and computational biology. His recent work has been focusing on building single-neuron whole-brain level 3D digital atlases for animals including fruitfly and C. elegans. He is also known for his minimum-redundant feature selection algorithm in the machine learning field.

Peterson, Brian
Team Lead for Computational Chemistry
Air Products and Chemicals

Brian Peterson received B.S. degrees in Chemical Engineering and Chemistry from Purdue, a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering (with Prof. K.E. Gubbins) from Cornell, and performed Post-Doctoral research in the Chemical Crystallography Laboratory at Oxford. He has 20 years of experience in the development and application of computer-based methods of chemistry, physics, and engineering. Recent work has included the prediction of dielectric and mechanical properties of thin films and the development of methods for studying the binding of small molecules to proteins. Other emphases have included quantum-chemical studies of structure, energetics, and reaction pathways, the application of percolation theory to the structure and behavior of solids, and the application of classical simulation methods to phase equilibria, adsorption, diffusion, and surfaces. Brian is currently Team Lead for Computational Chemistry at Air Products and Chemicals, Inc.

Ramshaw, Lance
Lead Scientist
BBN

Dr. Ramshaw has been a Lead Scientist in BBN's Speech and Language Processing group for over a decade, working on information extraction, question answering, and machine reading using trained statistical methods. He is currently in charge of the OntoNotes research effort, funded under the DARPA GALE (Global Autonomous Language Exploitation) program, a multi-site project that is annotating literal semantics in multiple languages and genres so that propositional structure, word sense, and coreference can be predicted using the same kinds of statistical modeling techniques that are currently used for parsing. He helped to develop BBN's earlier SIFT system, which used a statistical parser to identify semantic relations within syntactic parse tree structures. Before coming to BBN, he taught at Bowdoin College and spent a post-doc year with Dr. Mitchell Marcus at the University of Pennsylvania publishing work there on statistical noun phrase chunking that has served as the seed for a significant body of further research in that area.

Rötteler, Martin
Research Staff Member
NEC Labs

Martin Rötteler received the Ph.D. degree in computer science from the University of Karlsruhe, Germany, in 2001. Subsequently, he held a post-doc position at the Institute for Quantum Computing at the University of Waterloo. Currently, he is the leader of the Quantum IT group at NEC Laboratories America, located in Princeton, NJ. He has published more than 70 refereed journal and conference papers on quantum computing and is co-author of one book on quantum information. Martin Rötteler's research focuses on quantum algorithms, quantum error correcting codes, and signal processing.

Singh, Mona
Associate Professor
Princeton University

Dr. Singh earned an AB and SM in Computer Science at Harvard University. Her PhD is in Computer Science from MIT, and she has completed postdoctoral work at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research. Dr. Singh is currently Associate Professor (tenured) at Princeton University in the computer science department and the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics. She received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) in 2001, and the Rheinstein Faculty Award in 2003.

Vanderbei, Robert (website)
Chair and Professor of Operations Research and Financial Engineering
Princeton University

Robert Vanderbei has been chair of Princeton University’s Operations Research and Financial Engineering department since 2005, and professor since 1990. His research interests lie in algorithms for nonlinear optimization and their application to problems arising in engineering and science. Application areas of interest focus mainly on inverse Fourier transform optimization problems and action minimization problems with a special interest in applying these techniques to the design of a telescope for NASA’s propsoed Terrestrial Planet Finder (TPF) program. Vanderbei, who earned a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from Cornell University in 1981, is the author of Linear Programming: Foundations and Extensions, a widely adopted textbook on linear programming, as well as author of nonlinear-optimization software package LOQO. Vanderbei has received national recognition for his "Purple America" maps of the 2000 and subsequent U.S. Presidential elections -- a blended, county-by-county map that forms a poignant counterpoint to the “Red/Blue” maps prevalent in election media coverage and driven by Electoral College results.

Yang, Lin
Assistant Professor
UMDNJ-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School

Lin Yang is an assistant professor with the Dept. of Radiology in the UMDNJ-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. He received the Ph. D. in Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering from Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey in 2009. He conducted his graduate research at the RIUL and CBII during his Ph. D. stage. He did his internships in Siemens Corporate Research and IBM T. J. Watson Research Center in 2007 and 2008. His major research interests are focus on imaging informatics, machine learning/data mining, medical image analysis, high performance computing in bioinformatics, and computer vision. He is also working on the design and development for content based image and video retrieval and computer aided diagnostics.