PUBLICATIONS Inside Illinois Vol. 21, No. 9, Nov. 1, 2001

Danny Powell joins NCSA as executive director Nov. 1

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the UI announced Oct. 25 that Danny Powell of Rice University in Houston is the new executive director of the center.

Powell, an administrator with more than 15 years of experience managing academic IT research programs, joins the NCSA staff Nov.1.

Powell will manage the day-to-day operations of NCSA and work to link NCSA staff members and programs with the National Computational Science Alliance and NCSA’s Private Sector Program. He also will act as NCSA’s day-to-day liaison with the UI, the National Science Foundation and the state of Illinois. He succeeds Jim Bottum, who left NCSA last summer to become vice president for information technology and chief information officer at Purdue University.

"Danny Powell is a proven leader with many years of experience managing large interdisciplinary, multi-institutional research projects," said Dan Reed, director of NCSA and the Alliance and chief architect for the new NSF TeraGrid. "His experience, knowledge, creativity and skill in dealing with both people and budgets will be a tremendous asset to NCSA."

Powell most recently served as associate director at Rice’s Los Alamos Computer Science Institute and as the associate director for the Center for High Performance Software Research, also at Rice. Before those positions, Powell worked as associate director at two other Rice research centers: the NSF Science and Technology Center for Research on Parallel Computation and the Computer and Information Technology Institute. He was the business manager for the Rice computer science department from 1987 to 1996 and ran a computer-based engineering services company from 1983 to 1986.