BIOLOGY

San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) Director, Dr. Fran Berman, has been named one of the top women in technology by the editors of Business Week magazine. Berman is featured along with seven other elite women in the technology industry including Susan Bostrom of Cisco and Lorrie Norrington of Intuit. Highlights from the feature story include: "Berman is the only woman on the planet in charge of a supercomputing facility. That's a rarefied neighborhood. In the info-tech geek hierarchy, supercomputer jocks are the equivalent of NASA rocket scientists. It's one of the rare academic jobs that's insanely cool. Writing software and configuring constellations of machines to handle data sets from disparate fields such as geophysics, astronomy and economics remains fiendishly difficult. That's where Berman and San Diego shine, said Peter Freeman, head of the computer information, science and engineering programs at the National Science Foundation. "They're generally considered to be one of the leaders, if not the leader in the country, in dealing with massive amounts of data," says Freeman. The full story can be accessed at http://www.businessweek.com/technology/. "I'm thrilled to see Dr. Berman receive this well-deserved recognition," said Robert C. Dynes, president of the University of California. "She is certainly paving the way for women in technology. But beyond that, Dr. Berman's leadership and pioneering spirit continue to inspire significant advancements in modern science and technology that make this world a better place for us all to live." Dr. Berman's vision for SDSC is to innovate, develop and deploy customer-focused technology designed to advance science and engineering. For over a decade, Berman has been a pioneer and international leader in the area of grid computing, the study of hardware, software and collaboration technologies that allow scientists to link computing and communication resources together to execute modern science and engineering applications. As a result, Dr. Berman was asked to serve as NPACI (National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure) director and principal investigator of the National Science Foundation-supported TeraGrid, providing leadership and vision for a broad set of international initiatives in grid and high performance computing. The mission of the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) is to innovate, develop, and deploy technology to advance science. SDSC is involved in an extensive set of collaborations and activities at the intersection of technology and science whose purpose is to enable and facilitate the next generation of scientific advances. Founded in 1985 and primarily funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), SDSC is an organized research unit of the University of California, San Diego. With a staff of more than 400 scientists, software developers, and support personnel, SDSC is an international leader in data management, grid computing, biosciences, geosciences, and visualization. For more information, see www.sdsc.edu.