ACADEMIA

The LSU Center for Computation & Technology, or CCT, has hired Jarek Nabrzyski as its executive director. As executive director at the CCT, Nabrzyski will work under CCT Director Ed Seidel to identify and pursue strategic endeavors that promote and advance LSU’s research, education and economic development activities. “Jarek has an excellent track record in identifying and uniting people from around the world who can work together through supercomputing and grid technologies to enable breakthroughs in a variety of areas. We are very happy he will be joining the CCT,” Seidel said. “His expertise will help us tremendously as we grow the center and look for more collaborative opportunities for LSU and the state in future years.” Nabrzyski has worked for more than 10 years at the Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center in Poland, where he manages the scientific applications department. He also serves on the center’s board of directors. His research specialties include distributed applications, operations research and Grid and high-performance computing. The Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center houses advanced cyberinfrastructure, including an optical network, called PIONIER, deployed throughout Poland and connecting to the European GÉANT network that is similar to the resources of the Louisiana Optical Network Initiative, or LONI. With his experience developing and advancing this cyberinfrastructure, Nabrzyski can help Louisiana researchers develop new applications for LONI. During his work in Poznan, Nabrzyski has established international partnerships to advance Grid computing, networking and high-performance computing capabilities among academic and industrial organizations. He has served as a principal investigator or co-principal investigator on many international, European Union-funded projects and was the coordinator and co-principal investigator on the GridLab project, which developed the Grid Application Toolkit and the GridSphere portal framework. Nabrzyski has a master’s degree in information sciences and a doctor of philosophy degree in computer science from the Poznan University of Technology. He has published more than 20 scholarly papers and authored two books. He also serves as the European Commission’s expert on Grid and distributed computing. Prior to joining the Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center in 1995, Nabrzyski managed the IT department for the Polish Bank of Agriculture Development and also worked as a research programmer at Poznan University of Technology. Nabrzyski will begin coordinating CCT projects and initiatives from the Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center in the spring 2008 semester, transitioning into his new position with the CCT. He will move to Louisiana and assume an office full-time at the CCT in May 2008.