APPLICATIONS

Merle Giles has been appointed as the new director of NCSA's Private Sector Program, which puts the center's expert staff and technological innovations to work on the real-world challenges faced by business and industry. "Merle Giles brings more than 30 years of business experience to NCSA," said center director Thom Dunning. "He will raise our already successful partnership program to a new level." Giles previously led the Executive MBA program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. As the program's director, he led teams of executives on consulting projects for major international companies, including Coca-Cola, Caterpillar, John Deere, EuroDisney, Volkswagen, and Xerox. Giles earlier served as president and chief executive officer of Sheridan Bank of Peoria (later First of America Bank-Peoria) and as chief financial officer of Star Transport, Inc. He also operated a real estate and business brokerage business. Giles said he is excited about the potential to apply supercomputing and other advanced technologies to a wide range of business issues. "I'm impressed by the competitive advantages NCSA has provided for corporate partners­from using supercomputers for drug discovery to mining sales data to spot trends," he said. "I'm looking forward to identifying new challenges that NCSA and our partners can solve together." Giles earned an MBA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a bachelor's degree in accounting and business administration from Illinois State University. He is an alumnus of the Stonier Graduate School of Banking at the University of Delaware and holds a CPA certificate. "One of the exciting aspects of this position is that it gives me the opportunity to reach out to industry and work with them to bring NCSA's unique capabilities and resources to bear on their most challenging problems," Giles said. NCSA's current partners include: Abaqus, ACNielsen, Boeing, Caterpillar, Deere, Dell, Eclipse Energy Inc., ExxonMobil, IBM, Innerlink, JPMorgan, Microsoft, Motorola, Research Triangle Institute, and State Farm. Partnerships are available for companies of any size, from small start-ups to the largest corporations. For more information, see http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/AboutUs/Directorates/psp.html.