IDRE First Annual Kickoff Speakers

Block Photo Chancellor Gene Block

Dr. Gene Block became chancellor of UCLA in summer 2007, taking the helm of a world-class institution comprising 37,000 students and 27,000 faculty and staff, with an annual budget of $3.7 billion. As chief executive officer, he oversees all aspects of the university’s three-part mission of education, research and service.

He also holds appointments on the UCLA faculty in the department of psychiatry and bio behavioral sciences in the David Geffen School of Medicine and in the department of physiological science in the College of Letters and Science.

Previously, Dr. Block served as vice president and provost of the University of Virginia, where he also held the Alumni Council Thomas Jefferson Professorship in Biology. With academic expertise in biological clocks, he conducts research on the neurobiology of circadian rhythms in higher organisms, leading a research lab funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

A native of Monticello, NY, Chancellor Block holds a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Stanford University and a master’s and Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Oregon. He also completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford, working with the late Colin Pittendrigh, “the father of biological timing” and distinguished biologist Donald Kennedy, who later served as president of Stanford.

Peccei Photo Roberto D. Peccei, UCLA Vice Chancellor for Research

Roberto D. Peccei is Vice Chancellor for Research at UCLA a position he has held since October, 2000. He is a particle theorist whose principal interests lie in the area of electroweak interactions and in the interface between particle physics and cosmology.

Peccei was born in Italy, completed his secondary school in Argentina, and came   to the United States in 1958 to pursue his university studies in physics. He obtained a B.S. from MIT in 1962, and M.S. from NYU in 1964 and a Ph.D. from MIT in 1969. After a brief period of postdoctoral work at the University of Washington, he joined the faculty of Stanford University in 1971. In 1978, he returned to Europe as a staff member of the Max Planck Institute in Munich, Germany. He joined the Deutsches Elektron Synchrotron (DESY) Laboratory in Hamburg, Germany, as the Head of the Theoretical Group in 1984. He returned to the United States in 1989, joining the faculty of the Department of Physics at UCLA. Soon thereafter, he became Chair of the Department, a position he held until becoming Dean of the Division of Physical Sciences of the College of Letters and Sciences in November, 1993.

Peccei was the Schroedinger Professor at the University of Vienna in 1983, the Boris Jacobsohn Lecturer at the University of Washington in 1986, the Phi Beta Kappa Lecturer at UCLA and the Emilio Segre Professor at the University of Tel Aviv in 1992, and delivered the first Abdus Salam Memorial Lecture in Pakistan in 1997. He has served on numerous advisory boards both in Europe and the United States in the last 25 years. He is a member of the Club of Rome and is the President of the Fondazione Aurelio Peccei. He presently serves on the Board of the California Biomedical Association, is the Chair of the governing Board of the California NanoSystems Institute and is a member of the Visiting Committee for the Department of Physics at MIT. He is a Fellow of both the American Physical Society and the Institute of Physics in the United Kingdom.

Mori Photo Warren B. Mori, Director of the Institute for Digital Research and Education      

He obtained his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering in 1984 and 1987, respectively. He has been on the faculty of the Electrical Engineering Department and/or the Physics Department since 1987. Currently he is a full professor in both departments at UCLA. He also consults for Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Prof. Mori holds the patents for the method for upshifting light frequency by rapid plasma creation, and for the use of relativistic ionization fronts for tunable radiation. His work earned the International Center for Theoretical Physics Medal for Excellence in Nonlinear Plasma Physics by a Young Researcher in 1995, and in 1997 he was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society for his "outstanding contributions to particle simulations of complex laser-plasma phenomena and of plasma based light sources".

Dr. Mori is a member of the American Physical Society, the Optical Society of America, and the IEEE. For more information about Prof. Mori and his research, please see the E.E. Department's Laser-Plasma Group website, and the Physics Department's UCLA Plasma Simulation Group website.

Anderson Photo Chris Anderson, UCLA Professor of Mathematics, Director of the UCLA Program in Computing

He received a Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1983. From 1983-1986 he was an NSF Post-doc in the Computer Science department at Stanford. Except for a year as a Senior Researcher at IBM Yorktown Heights in 1994, he has been a full-time faculty member at UCLA. His research concerns the development and implementation of numerical methods for scientific computing, with an emphasis on problems in computational fluid mechanics and quantum device simulation.

Dr. Anderson's most recent work has focused on the creation of computationally efficient simulation tools used for the design of electrostatically confined quantum dots. His research has been supported by ONR, NSF, AFOSR and DARPA. He is the recipient of an NSF Presidential Young Investigator award, a Sloan fellowship, the UCLA Department of Mathematics Distinguished Teaching Award, and the UCLA Academic Senate Distinguished Teaching Award.

Palsberg Photo Jens Palsberg, UCLA Professor of Computer Science

His research interests span the areas of compilers, embedded systems, programming languages, software engineering, and information security.

He has authored over 80 technical papers, co-authored the book Object-Oriented Type Systems, and co-authored the 2002 revision of Appel's textbook on Modern Compiler Implementation in Java.

He is the recipient of National Science Foundation CAREER and ITR awards, a Purdue University Faculty Scholar award, an IBM Faculty Award, and an Okawa Foundation research award.

Dr. Palsberg's research has also been supported by DARPA, Intel, and British Telecom.

Dr. Palsberg is an associate editor of ACM Transactions of Programming Languages and Systems, a member of the editorial board of Information and Computation, and a former member of the editorial board of IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering.

He is serving as the vice-chair of ACM SIGBED, Special Interest Group on Embedded Systems, and he has served as associate head of Computer Science at Purdue University, as vice chair of Computer Science at UCLA, and as the general chair of the ACM Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages.

Labate Photo Bill Labate, Director of ATS, Research Computing Technologies

He has worked in the IT field for over 25 years with technical and management positions in aerospace & defense, commercial and education. His areas of emphasis are high performance computing, Grid infrastructure, IT and project management, software development, IT infrastructure, consulting, as well as financial planning and analysis of IT projects. In addition to his role at ATS, Bill is currently the chairman of the UC Research Computing Group and project manager for the UC Grid Project.

Reveil Photo Margo Reveil, Director of ATS, Research and Education Services

Her primary focus is the integration and use of technology to advance the research mission. Margo is also a licensed architect in the State of California and has successfully combined her knowledge of architecture and IT to design and develop two immersive virtual reality theaters that support the development and presentation of scientific visualizations and historical architectural models. This seemingly diverse but effective skill set also allows her to use project and process management skills across multiple scales and project types - from websites and databases to complex technology rooms and buildings. In her thirteen-year career at UCLA she has successfully leveraged and applied these talents as a multimedia and web developer, project manager, and technology integrator providing effective translation between technology professionals and researchers to create useable and highly functional IT solutions

Berman Photo Francine Berman, Professor, UCSD Department of Computer Science and Engineering

Fellow of the ACM, and first holder of the High Performance Computing Endowed Chair in the Jacobs School of Engineering at UCSD. Dr. Berman is a pioneer in Grid Computing and an international leader in the development of Cyberinfrastructure. She has worked extensively in the areas of adaptive middleware, parallel programming environments, scheduling, and high performance computing.

Since 2001, Dr. Berman has served as Director of the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) where she leads a staff of 400+ interdisciplinary scientists, engineers, and technologists in the innovation and provision of national-scale Cyberinfrastructure. SDSC is an NSF Cyberinfrastructure Center with a focus on data, via the innovation and provision of hardware, software and human resources which enable data-oriented research, education, applications, and professional practice. As Director of SDSC, Dr. Berman is considered both a visionary and a pragmatist, and is a national advocate for the development of a comprehensive data Cyberinfrastructure.

Dr. Berman is one of the two founding Principal Investigators of the National Science Foundation's TeraGrid project, and also directed the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI), a consortium of 41 research groups, institutions, and university partners with the goal of building national infrastructure to support research and education in science and engineering. She serves on a variety of national and international groups and committees including the National Science Foundation's Engineering Advisory Committee and the National Institutes of Health's NIGMS Advisory Committee. For her accomplishments, leadership, and vision, Dr. Berman was recognized in 2004 as one of the top women in technology by BusinessWeek and as one of the top technologists by IEEE Spectrum.

 

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