The Executive Committee for Research Computing and Cyberinfrastructure includes seven faculty members from four different colleges and the Penn State Applied Research Laboratory. Ex-Officio members include: the Director of the Institute for CyberScience, the Vice President for Information Technology and Chief Information Officer, the Chief Information Security Officer, the Associate CIO for Research, and the co-chairs of the RCCI Advisory Council.
The role of the smaller, more nimble EC is to provide advice to, receive advice from, and serve as a steering body for the Advisory Council. The Executive Committee is the link between the Advisory Council and the senior leadership of the University, and they report directly to the Senior Vice President for Research. Members of the executive committee are nominated by the Advisory Council, with final selection and appointment by the Senior Vice President for Research.
Current members of the Executive Committee include:
Chris Forest · Co-Chair
cef13 AT psu.edu
Chris E. Forest joined the faculty in 2008 as Associate Professor of Climate Dynamics in the Department of Meteorology and Atmospheric Science at The Pennsylvania State University. He is also currently affiliated with the Department of Geosciences, an associate in the Earth and Environmental Systems Institute, and associate director for the Network for Sustainable Climate Risk Management. His research focuses on quantifying uncertainty in climate predictions and their implications for assessing climate risks. He has a B.S. in Applied Mathematics, Engineering, and Physics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Ph.D. in meteorology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Read more…
Rick Gilmore · Co-Chair
rog1 AT psu.edu
Rick O. Gilmore is Professor of Psychology and a Huck Institute of the Life Sciences Faculty Co-fund. He earned his bachelor’s degree magna cum laude in Cognitive Science from Brown University, and holds both a MA and Ph.D. in Psychology from Carnegie Mellon University. At Carnegie Mellon, he participated in the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition (CNBC) training program in cognitive neuroscience. Gilmore’s research focuses on the development of visual perception and memory. He is particularly interested in the development of brain networks that enable perceivers to extract information about the layout of the environment, the shape of objects, and the speed and direction of self-movement from patterns of visual motion called optic flow. Gilmore is also keenly interested in developing tools and practices that make scientific research more open, transparent, and reproducible. Read more…
Guido Cervone
cervone AT psu.edu
Guido Cervone received his B.S. in Computer Science in 1998, his M.S. in Computer Science in 2000, and his Ph.D. in Computational Sciences and Informatics in 2005. He serves as an Associate Director of the Institute for CyberScience, an Associate Professor of Geography, and Director of the GeoInformatics and Earth Observation Lab. His formal background is in Computational Science and Remote Sensing, and his research focuses on the development and application of computational algorithms for the analysis of spatio-temporal remote sensing; numerical modeling; and social media “Big Data” related to environmental hazards and renewable energy. He focuses on problems related to the fusion of heterogenous data at different temporal and spatial scales. Read more…
Keith Cheng
kcc2 AT psu.edu
Keith Cheng is the Principal Investigator of the Cheng Lab. After earning his B.A. in Biochemical Sciences at Harvard University, he earned his M.D. at NYU. He began his residency in Anatomic Pathology at Brigham & Women’s Hospital, finishing his residency at University of Washington before earning a Ph.D. in Genetic Recombination. After finishing his postdoctoral training in Mechanisms of Mutation at the University of Washington, he began his current role as Principal Investigator of the Cheng Lab at Penn State Milton S. Hershey College of Medicine. Read more…
Micah Clark
mhc77 AT psu.edu
Micah H. Clark is the senior scientist for Autonomy, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Cognitive Science at the Penn State Applied Research Laboratory (ARL). His work is dedicated to AI-related S&T and RDT&E in service of national, international, and humanitarian needs. Prior to joining Penn State ARL, Dr. Clark maintained dual roles as both a program officer at the U.S. Navy, Office of Naval Research (ONR) and a research scientist at the Florida Institute for Human & Machine Cognition (IHMC). At ONR, Dr. Clark managed sponsored research programs in cognitive science, artificial intelligence, autonomy, human-robot interaction, and human-machine teaming. At IHMC, Dr. Clark’s research focused on areas of human-inspired AI such as computational theory of mind, socio-cognitive models of trust, psychology of reasoning, persuasive discourse, and roboethics.
Prasenjit Mitra
pum10 AT psu.edu
Prasenjit Mitra is a Professor in the College of Information Sciences and Technology; he serves on the graduate faculty of the Department of Computer Sciences and Engineering and is an affiliate faculty member of the Department of Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering at The Pennsylvania State University. His current research interests are in the areas of big data analytics, applied machine learning, and visual analytics. In the past, he has contributed to the areas of data interpretation, data cleaning, and digital libraries especially in tabular data extraction, and citation recommendation. Mitra received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 2004 where he investigated issues related to modeling data and the semantics of data in an information integration system. At Penn State, he has pursued research on a broad range of topics ranging from data mining on the web and social media, scalable data cleaning, political text mining, chemical formula and name extraction from documents, and the extraction of data and metadata from figures and tables in digital documents.
Robert Nicholas
ren10 AT psu.edu
Robert Nicholas received his B.S. in Physics from Bucknell University in 1994, his M.A.T. in Natural Science from Colgate University in 1996, and his Ph.D. in Atmospheric Science from the University of Washington in 2005. He is an atmospheric scientist with research interests in the areas of climate dynamics, empirical downscaling, uncertainty quantification, and Earth system modeling working within Penn State’s Earth and Environmental Systems Institute (EESI). Much of his current work focuses on the development of decision-relevant climate information, with a particular focus on agricultural, water resources, forestry, and biodiversity management applications. He also serves as the Managing Director of the Network for Sustainable Climate Risk Management (SCRiM), Managing Director of the Program on Coupled Human and Earth Systems (PCHES), and Lead for the NOAA Mid-Atlantic RISA (MARISA) Climate Information Office. Read more…
Sy-Miin Chow
symiin AT psu.edu
Sy-Miin Chow is a Professor of Human Development and Family Studies in the College of Health and Human Development and is the Principal Investigator of the Emotions and Dynamic Systems Lab. Dr. Chow’s research focuses on the development and adaptation of modeling and analysis tools that are suited to evaluating linear and nonlinear dynamical systems models, including longitudinal structural equation models and state-space modeling techniques. Her current work involves using Kalman filter approaches and dynamical systems models to represent the dynamics of emotion regulation. Her longer term aim is to develop a broader repertoire of data-driven tools tailored toward analyzing the kinds of longitudinal data typically available in the social and behavioral sciences. Dr. Chow received her Ph.D. in Quantitative Psychology from the University of Virginia. Read more…