Sangtae Kim Heads NSF Division of Shared Cyberinfrastructure

Published 03/02/2004

Sangtae Kim Heads NSF Division of Shared Cyberinfrastructure New division of Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate oversees PACI and TeraGrid programsThe NSF Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering has announced that Dr. Sangtae Kim has been named the new Director for the Division of Shared Cyberinfrastructure (SCI). The Division of Shared Cyberinfrastructure (SCI) supports design, development, and deployment of a set of interconnected computational resources, data repositories, digital libraries, sensors, and domain-specific instruments known as cyberinfrastructure. These resources are widely shared across multiple scientific and engineering domains; they enable researchers and educators to share digital knowledge environments and disseminate new knowledge across distance, time, and fields of expertise.

Sangtae "Sang" Kim will draw upon his unique combination of leadership experiences to help NSF meet the cyberinfrastructure needs of the broad science and engineering community. A member of the National Academy of Engineering and a fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering, Dr. Kim joins NSF from Purdue University, where he served as the Donald W. Fedderson Distinguished Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Distinguished Professor of Chemical Engineering since 2003. His research interests include high-performance computing, computational biology, microfluidics, and rheology (the study of the deformation and flow of matter - in particular, non-Newtonian flow of liquids and plastic "creep" of solids).

Previous to his position at Purdue, Sang served as vice president and information officer of Lilly Research Laboratories (a division of Eli Lilly and Company), where he provided both vision and leadership for cyberinfrastructure in the data-intensive, post-genomic environment of the research-based pharmaceutical industry. The departments reporting to Dr. Kim were responsible for the many facets of information technology in modern pharmaceutical R&D, including discovery research, preclinical development, and clinical research. He joined Lilly in 2000 from Parke-Davis Pharmaceutical Research, a division of Warner-Lambert Company. >From 1983 to 1997, Sang was a faculty member in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he earned the rank of full professor for his work in mathematical and computational methods for microfluidics. In 1990, in recognition of his teaching and research accomplishments in high performance computing, Sang was extended a courtesy faculty appointment in the Department of Computer Sciences at Wisconsin. He also served on the peer review boards of the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. His research and education activities continue, currently focusing on the intersection of applied mathematics, biological sciences, and informatics. Sang's research citations include the Allan P. Colburn Award of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers and the Award for Initiatives in Research from the National Academy of Sciences. He is the author of two advanced research monographs, _Microhydrodynamics_ (coauthored with S. Karrila) and _Microstructures in Elastic Media_ (coauthored with N. Phan-Thien). Born in 1958 in Seoul, Korea, Dr. Kim received concurrent BSc and MSc degrees from the California Institute of Technology in 1979 and a PhD from Princeton in 1983. He also studied at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at Cambridge University (1981). He received a Presidential Young Investigator award from NSF in 1985.

At NSF, Dr. Kim will oversee investigations in several areas, including:

• High-Performance Computational Infrastructure - SCI supports acquisition, operation and upgrading of national infrastructure in support of high-end computation for the academic research and education community.
• Advanced Networking Technologies and Infrastructure - SCI supports networks of various capabilities and purposes, from high-speed backbone networks that connect high-performance computational resources and high-end instrumentation sites, to wireless networks that connect embedded sensor nodes in remote scientific field sites.
• Advanced Services and Cybertools - Researchers are developing an array of software tools and services that hide the implementation complexities and heterogeneity while offering clean logical interfaces to users. These tools and services include information management systems and data services, scalable interactive visualization tools, and middleware service building blocks for high-end computational resources and for networked instrumentations and sensors.

As head of the SCI division, Dr. Kim will work closely with the NSF Directorates and Offices to ensure that the nation's advanced cyberinfrastructure will meet the demands of tomorrow's science and engineering communities.