Steve Pennycook
Topic: our latest Office of Science proposal "Quantitative
Imaging and Spectroscopy with Sub-Ångström Probes"
Stephen J. Pennycook is a Corporate Fellow in the Condensed Matter Sciences
Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and leader of the Electron
Microscopy Group. Current research interests focus on the study of
materials and nanostructures through the technique of Z‑contrast scanning
transmission electron microscopy and electron energy loss spectroscopy. He
has given over 125 invited presentations at international conferences and
has over 400 publications, 35 in Science, Nature or Physical Review Letters,
15 book chapters and 3 encyclopedia articles. He is a recipient of the
Materials Research Society Medal and the Thomas Young Medal of the Institute
of Physics. Tony Mezzacappa
Topic: Perspectives on Funding in Nuclear and Computational Astrophysics
Dr. Mezzacappa is a Corporate Fellow and Group Leader for Theoretical Astrophysics in the Physics Division of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and has been on staff at ORNL since 1996. He is also Adjunct Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Tennessee. Dr.
Mezzacappa held postdoctoral appointments at the University of Pennsylvania
and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a research faculty
position at the University of Tennessee prior to joining the ORNL staff. He
completed his B.S. degree in physics at M.I.T. in 1980 and his Ph.D. in
physics at the Center for Relativity at the University of Texas at Austin in
1988. He has worked in the areas of astrophysics and cosmology and
specializes in the theory of core collapse supernovae, stellar explosions
that are the dominant source of elements in the Universe. Dr. Mezzacappa
received a DOE Young Scientist Award from Secretary of Energy Richardson and
a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers from
President Clinton in 1999 for his contributions to core collapse supernova
theory. He was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2004 and
a UT-Battelle Corporate Fellow in 2005 in recognition of his supernova
research and his role in the development of computational science in the
U.S. He is the Principal Investigator of the Department of Energy's SciDAC
TeraScale Supernova Initiative, an international initiative involving nearly
four dozen researchers from a dozen institutions in the U.S. and Europe,
including the University of Tennessee. Dr. Mezzacappa has served on numerous
national committees, and has chaired or served as an organizing committee
member for a number of international conferences. He is the scientific
editor-in-chief of the SciDAC Review and Computational Science and
Discovery, two computational science journals. Dr. Mezzacappa is the author
of nearly one hundred scientific publications, has edited several volumes in
his field, and has given numerous invited talks internationally. He has also
been active in communicating science to the general public. He was among a
select group of researchers across the U.S. who participated in the American
Physical Society’s Centennial Public Face for Physics initiative, and his
work has been featured in the local and national press on a number of
occasions. In addition to his involvement with the Board of Trustees of the
East Tennessee Discovery Center, Dr. Mezzacappa has been active in the
development of science education and the use of information technology for
instruction at Sequoyah Elementary School of Knoxville. Al Geist
Topic: How to improve your "hit" rate with proposals - the steps to do
before you start writing and after it is turned in.
Al Geist is a Corporate Research Fellow at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where he leads the 35 member Computer Science Research Group. He is one of the original developers of PVM (Parallel Virtual Machine), which became a world-wide de facto standard for heterogeneous distributed computing. Al was actively involved in the design of the Message Passing Interface (MPI-1 and MPI-2) standard and more recently the development of FT-MPI, a fault tolerant MPI implementation. Today He leads a national Scalable Systems Software effort, involving all the DOE and NSF supercomputer sites, with the goal of defining standardized interfaces between system software components. Al is co-PI of a national Genomes to Life (GTL) center. The goal of his GTL center is to develop new algorithms, and computational infrastructure for understanding protein machines and regulatory pathways in cells. He heads up a project developing self-adapting, fault tolerant algorithms for 100,000 processor systems.
In his 22 years at ORNL, he has published two books and over 200 papers in areas ranging from heterogeneous distributed computing, numerical linear algebra, parallel computing, collaboration technologies, solar energy, materials science, biology, and solid state physics.
Al has won numerous awards in high-performance and distributed computing including: the Gordon Bell Prize (1990), the international IBM Excellence in Supercomputing Award (1990), an R&D 100 Award (1994), two DOE Energy 100 awards (2001), the American Museum of Science and Energy Award (1997), and the Supercomputing Heterogeneous Computing Challenge several times (1992, 1993, 1995, 1996).