Science In Silico: How Desktop Supercomputing Is Revolutionizing Science

Speakers

Ralph K. Cavin, III, PhD

Semiconductor Research Corporation
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Ralph Cavin is vice president for Research Operations at Semiconductor Research Corporation. Cavin's technical interests span VLSI circuit design, computer-aided design of microelectronic systems, control theory with applications to semiconductor manufacturing, and applications of computing and telecommunications to engineering education.

Cavin received his PhD in Electrical Engineering from Auburn University in 1968. After taking his PhD, Cavin joined the faculty of the Department of Electrical Engineering at Texas A&M University where he obtained the rank of full professor and also served the department as assistant head for research. In 1983 he joined the Semiconductor Research Corporation where he served as director of design sciences research programs until 1989. He became head of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at North Carolina State University from 1989 to 1994 and was dean of Engineering from 1994 to 1995.

Cavin is a fellow of the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). He has served as a consultant to a number of government, industrial, and academic institutions and is a member of the Board of Directors of the International Engineering Consortium and the IEEE Computer Advisory Board.

Harold A. Scheraga, PhD

Cornell University
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Harold Scheraga is the George W. and Grace L. Todd Professor of Chemistry, Emeritus at the Baker Laboratory of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Cornell University. His laboratory is investigating the interactions that dictate the folding of a polypeptide chain in water into the three-dimensional structure of a native protein and that determine the reactivity of such a protein molecule (e.g., as an enzyme) with other small and large molecules.

Scheraga has won numerous honors and awards. He was a Guggenheim Fellow and a Fulbright Research Scholar. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is also an honorary life member of the New York Academy of Sciences. Scheraga has won the ACS Mobil Award in Polymer Chemistry, the ACS Repligen Award for Chemistry of Biological Processes, and many others.

Scheraga obtained his PhD from Duke University.

Tamar Schlick, PhD

Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences
New York University
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Tamar Schlick is professor of chemistry, mathematics, and computer sciences in the Department of Chemistry and the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. She was the director of the new multidepartmental Computational Biology Doctoral Program at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and director of program development for the Department of Chemistry at NYU from 2003 to 2006. Schlick was an associate investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute from 1994 to 2003. Schlick has received many honors, including being named 2005 Businesswoman of the Year, an American Physical Society Fellow, and an American Association for the Advancement of Science Fellow.

Tamar Schlick obtained her MS and PhD in applied mathematics at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University.

Sai Ravela, PhD

Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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Sai Ravela is a research scientist in Computational Earth Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He studied computer vision and robotics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and received his PhD in 2002.

His enduring research interest is to design and use methods that can answer queries about the behavior of stochastic spatio-temporal processes. To do so, he studies estimation, control, decision, and information theories. Currently, he focuses on earth systems estimation, specifically to design algorithms that overcome the problems of nonlinearity, dimensionality and uncertainty that is characteristic of earth problems and a real barrier to effective predictability.

J. Jeremy Rice, PhD

IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
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John Jeremy Rice is a research staff member of the Functional Genomics and Systems Biology Group at IBM's T. J. Watson Research Center. He is also an adjunct faculty member in the Department of Engineering at the Johns Hopkins University. Rice obtained his PhD from the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Johns Hopkins University. Prior to joining IBM Research, Rice was a computational modeler and research scientist at Physiome Sciences in Princeton, New Jersey.

Catherine Zandonella

Catherine Zandonella is a science writer based in New York City, covering such topics as environmental science, public health, and applied technology. She has a master's degree in public health from the University of California, Berkeley. Zandonella has written for a number of publications, including New Scientist, The Scientist, and Nature.