Biography

Biography

Daniel S. Katz is Chief Scientist at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), Research Professor in the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science, and Research Professor in the School of Information Sciences (iSchool) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He was previously a Senior Fellow in the Computation Institute (CI) at the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory (2009-2016), a Program Director in the Division of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure at the National Science Foundation (2012-2016), Director for Cyberinfrastructure Development (2006-2009) at the Center for Computation & Technology and adjunct faculty (2006-2021) at Louisiana State University (LSU), Open Grid Forum Area Co-director for Applications (2010-2012), and TeraGrid GIG Director of Science (2008-2011). From 1996 to 2006, he was at JPL in a variety of roles, including: Principal Member of the Information Systems and Computer Science Staff, Supervisor of the Parallel Applications Technologies group, Area Program Manager of High End Computing in the Space Mission Information Technology Office, Applications Project Element Manager for the Remote Exploration and Experimentation (REE) Project, and Team Leader for MOD Tool (a tool for the integrated design of microwave and millimeter-wave instruments). From 1993 to 1996, he was employed by Cray Research (and later by Silicon Graphics) as a Computational Scientist on-site at JPL and Caltech, specializing in parallel implementation of computational electromagnetic algorithms.
Dan's interest is in the development and use of advanced cyberinfrastructure to solve challenging problems at multiple scales. His technical research interests are in applications, algorithms, fault tolerance, and programming in parallel and distributed computing, including HPC, Grid, Cloud, etc. He is also interested in policy issues, including citation and credit mechanisms and practices associated with software and data, organization and community practices for collaboration, and career paths for computing researchers. He received his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D degrees in Electrical Engineering from Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, in 1988, 1990, and 1994, respectively. His work is documented in numerous book chapters, journal and conference publications, and NASA Tech Briefs. He is a senior member of the IEEE and ACM, member of the IEEE Computer Society Board of Governors, founding editor and current Associate Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Open Source Software, co-founder and Steering Committee Chair of the Research Software Alliance (ReSA), and co-founder and steering committee member of the US Research Software Engineer (US-RSE) Association.