Leadership Council
In June 2020, the SimCenter Leadership Council convened its first annual meeting. The council comprises 11 highly qualified individuals from industry and national lab partners, plus one UTC faculty representative and one UTC student representative. Duties of a Leadership Council member for the two-year inaugural period will include the following:
- Work to finalize the charter for the Leadership Council
- Help to identify opportunities for the SimCenter in your organization and throughout the United States
- Provide input and advice on how the SimCenter can grow and prosper
- Help to advocate at the UT system level, where appropriate, to enhance the SimCenter
- Connect UTC faculty with others to help promote interdisciplinary research across our thrust areas
- Develop an annual report for the benefit of the SimCenter Director, the UTC Vice Chancellor for Research, and the UTC Chancellor that identifies the Council’s opinions on how well the SimCenter is doing and where it needs help to further advance the University mission
Members include:
Mr. Ron Brightwell Sandia National Lab (Read Bio)
Mr. Jeff Cornett, Oak Ridge National Lab (Read Bio)
Dr. Chris Cox, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga (Read Bio)
Dr. Kate Evans, Oak Ridge National Lab (Read Bio)
Dr. Bruce Hilbert, Branch Technology (Read Bio)
Barney Maccabe, Oak Ridge National Lab (Read Bio)
Dr. Kathryn Mohror, Lawrence Livermore National Lab (Read Bio)
Dr. Giuseppe Pizzorno, UT Health Science Center College of Medicine, Chattanooga campus, Erlanger Health System (Read Bio)
Dr. Howard Pritchard, Los Alamos National Lab (Read Bio)
Ms. Deb Socia, The Enterprise Center (Read Bio)
Mr. Tom Herschberg, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga (student) (Read Bio)
Other Collaborations
From local companies and start-up accelerators, to celebrated research institutions:
Ron Brightwell currently leads the Scalable System Software Department at Sandia National Laboratories. After joining Sandia in 1995, he was a key contributor to the high-performance interconnect software and lightweight operating system for the world’s first terascale system, the Intel ASCI Red machine. He was also part of the team responsible for the high-performance interconnect and lightweight operating system for the Cray Red Storm machine, which was the prototype for Cray’s successful XT product line. The impact of his interconnect research is visible in technologies available today from Atos (Bull), Intel, and Mellanox. Mr. Brightwell has also contributed to the development of the MPI-2 and MPI-3 specifications. He has authored more than 115 peer-reviewed journal, conference, and workshop publications. He has served on the technical program and organizing committees for numerous high-performance and parallel computing conferences and is a Senior Member of the IEEE and the ACM.
Jeff Cornett is the Manager for Industrial Partnerships & Economic Development at Oak Ridge National Lab (ORNL). He serves as a connection point for industry to connect with ORNL research teams in an effort to solve industry needs or transition research technology.
Prior to joining ORNL, he was the President and COO of the National Safe Skies Alliance (Safe Skies), with responsibilities for developing collaborative relationships with aviation-related technology-based industries, universities, and national labs. He also spent time as a risk consultant with the American Bureau of Shipping (ABS Consulting) on projects with the Department of Homeland Security, Railroad Research Foundation, maritime port operators, and numerous chemical industry clients.
Prior to Safe Skies, Mr. Cornett spent 9 years in DOE Oak Ridge Protective Services with both Lockheed Martin Energy Systems and Wackenhut Services-Oak Ridge. He served in several security capacities: tactical response, computing and telecommunications, and management/implementation of the performance testing program.
Mr. Cornett has extensive experience performing operational evaluations of security technology components, systems, and personnel, as well as risk and vulnerability analyses of implemented or concept systems. His diverse background represents a unique blend of skills that provide practical solutions for the issues facing industry, communities, and government. Mr. Cornett holds a Master’s degree in Organizational Management (MAOM) from Tusculum College.
Dr. Christopher Cox is a professor and head of the Department of Mathematics at UTC. Before coming to UTC, Dr. Cox taught at Clemson University and served in various capacities including department Coordinator of Instruction, Coordinator of Graduate Studies, and Department Chair. His area of research is numerical analysis and particular interests are in modeling of fluids arising in various applications, including filtration and polymer processing, from science and engineering. While at Clemson, Dr. Cox was on the leadership team for the multi-institutional grant from the NSF EPSCoR Research Infrastructure Improvement Track-1 Program, “Materials Assembly and Design Excellence in South Carolina,” (MADE in SC). Dr. Cox was also the modeling thrust co-leader for the Center for Advanced Engineering Fibers and Films (CAEFF), an NSF Engineering Research Center, from 1998 to 2008. He has taught a variety of courses from calculus through graduate numerical modeling. He earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Grove City College, then a master’s degree in applied math & PhD in math from Carnegie Mellon University.
Katherine J. Evans is the Division Director for the Computational Sciences and Engineering Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). She holds a joint associate professorship with the University of Tennessee’s Interdisciplinary Bredesen Center and serves on the leadership team for ORNL’s Climate Change Science Institute. She serves as the representative for the DOE’s Biological and Environmental Research program on the coordination committee of the DOE Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing (SciDAC) program. Dr. Evans is also an active researcher in the areas of Earth system model (ESM) evaluation, developing and implementing scalable numerical algorithms to improve the efficiency and accuracy for multi-scale configurations of ESM, and analysis of large-scale persistent weather patterns in global atmospheric models. As part of her numerical methods research with ESM, she also makes connections to other applications, including more general fluid flow, disease propagation, and oncology.
Dr. Evans earned her PhD in Earth and Atmospheric Sciences with an emphasis in math from Georgia Tech in 2000, where she was awarded the William Rhodes fellowship and the senior Dean’s fellowship for most outstanding senior PhD student. She joined ORNL in 2007 after a stint as a postdoctoral researcher and staff member at Los Alamos National Laboratory in the Decision Applications and Theoretical Divisions. She led the Computational Earth Sciences group at ORNL for 6 years before her current role.
C. Bruce Hilbert is the Director of Software Engineering at Chattanooga-based Branch Technology, an architectural scale 3D printing company. He is also a graduate and former employee of the SimCenter, a former Mathematics Professor at Chattanooga State, and a Chattanooga native. Dr. Hilbert’s academic specialty and interest is computational mesh generation for various applications.
Barney Maccabe currently serves as the Director for the Computer Science and Mathematics Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). The division has over 100 technical staff conducting research in a wide range of areas, including computational and applied mathematics; discrete systems; data analysis, visualization, management, and engineering; programming models, and tools; performance modeling, measurement, and analysis; system software; and emerging technologies. Prior to joining ORNL in January 2009, Dr. Maccabe served on the Computer Science faculty at the University of New Mexico (UNM) where he also served as director of the UNM Center for High-Performance Computing and the CIO for the university.
Much of Dr. Maccabe’s work has focused on the research related to lightweight approaches in high-performance (HPC) systems. In collaboration with staff at Sandia National Laboratories, he was involved in the design and development of a series of lightweight operating systems, starting with SUNMOS (Sandia-UNM OS) for the Intel Paragon in 1990. This collaboration has grown over the years to include a large collection of collaborators with a current emphasis on lightweight virtualization technologies aimed at supporting application composition in HPC systems. Barney earned his BS in Mathematics from the University of Arizona in 1977 and his MS and PhD in Information and Computer Sciences from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1980 and 1982, respectively.
Kathryn Mohror is the Group Leader for the Data Analysis Group in the Center for Applied Scientific Computing (CASC) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). Dr. Mohror’s research on high-end computing systems is currently focused on I/O for extreme scale systems. Her other research interests include scalable performance analysis and tuning, fault tolerance, and parallel programming paradigms. She has been working at LLNL since 2010 and is a 2019 recipient of the DOE Early Career Award.
Dr. Mohror’s current research focuses primarily on user-level file systems for HPC in the Unify project and on scalable I/O with the Scalable Checkpoint/Restart Library (SCR), an R&D100 Award-winning multilevel checkpointing library that has been shown to significantly reduce checkpointing overhead. She is also a Co-Chair of the Administrative Steering Committee for PMIx, a portable interface for tools and applications to interact with system management software. She was the lead for the Tools Working Group for the MPI Forum from 2013-2019 and served as the Scientific Editor for LLNL's Science & Technology Review in 2018.
Dr. Mohror received her Ph.D. in Computer Science in 2010, an M.S. in Computer Science in 2004, and a B.S. in Chemistry in 1999 from Portland State University (PSU) in Portland, OR.
Giuseppe Pizzorno, PhD*, PharmD*, is a Professor of Internal Medicine and Associate Dean of Research for the University of Tennessee Health Science Center (UTHSC) College of Medicine, Chattanooga campus, and the first Chief Research Officer for Erlanger Health System.
Before joining UTHSC, Dr. Pizzorno was the Founder, Deputy Director, and Head of Research of the Nevada Cancer Institute. He was also Director of Clinical Pharmacology for the Yale Cancer Center and Research Director of the Yale Pediatric Pharmacology Research Unit at Yale University School of Medicine.
Dr. Pizzorno received his Doctor of Pharmaceutical Chemistry and Technology and Doctor of Pharmacy degrees from the University of Genova, Italy. His areas of expertise are clinical and preclinical pharmacology, experimental therapeutics, translational research, and clinical research as it relates to cancer. He is also an active member of the American Association for Cancer Research. Dr. Pizzorno has reviewed material for the National Cancer Institute, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, Department of Defense, American Cancer Society, The Union for International Cancer Control, and many leading journals in cancer research and pharmacology. He has written or co-authored more than 100 scholarly articles and book chapters, and obtained funding for more than 25 individual and institutional research projects during his career.
Howard Pritchard is a Research Scientist at LANL and serves as the team lead for LANL’s HPC application readiness team. His areas of research include investigation of the performance of mission-critical applications on future systems, with a focus on architectures promising efficient computing at scale. Another area of his research is development of extensions to the MPI Standard as part of the Exascale Computing Project, as well as development and support of the Open MPI implementation of MPI. He is also active in the support and development of networking middleware software including OpenUCX , OFI libfabric, and OpenSHMEM.
Deb Socia is President and CEO of The Enterprise Center, a nonprofit that nurtures innovation in Chattanooga with the goal of connecting people to resources and building an inclusive community. Growing the entrepreneurial ecosystem and the Innovation District, building digital equity, and supporting research and implementation of smart city applications are all a part of the organization’s focus. Prior to her current role, Deb was the Executive Director of Next Century Cities, a nonprofit that supports community leaders as they seek to ensure that all have access to fast, affordable, and reliable Internet. Previously, Deb was the Executive Director of the Tech Goes Home program in Boston whose mission is to ensure digital equity. Deb’s early career included 32 years as an educator and administrator. She was the founding principal of the award winning Lilla G. Frederick Middle School, a Boston Public School where she led the one-to-one laptop initiative.
Deb has been the recipient of many awards for her work, including the NATOA Community Broadband Hero, the Pathfinder Award from MassCUE, the CRSTE Leadership and Vision Award, a Google Digital Inclusion Award, Motherboard Human of the Year, an NTENny Award, and the Charles Benton Digital Equity Award.
Tom Herschberg is an undergraduate student at UTC studying computer science and mathematics. At the SimCenter, he works on MPI Sessions development and implementation in ExaMPI and the development of a topology package for LAMMPS. He is also an intern at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he works on extending Open MPI to be able to use MPI Sessions with networking middleware software such as OFI libfabric.