CEE GRADUATE APPOINTED AS A DIRECTOR AT UCHICAGO

Hakizumwami Birali Runesha has been appointed the Director of Research Computing at the University of Chicago. In his new role, Runesha will provide leadership and vision for advancing all aspects of research computing strategies at the University. He will be responsible for the design, configuration and administration of centrally managed High-Performance Computing (HPC) systems and related services across the University.

The Director of Research Computing is a new position at UChicago. The new role was created in early 2010 as a result of a yearlong review process set in motion by President Robert J. Zimmer. Among his duties as the newly appointed director, Runesha will advise researchers on grant proposals that utilize HPC and consult with them on computational needs as well as data management issues to ensure research computing infrastructure meets current and future research needs.

Runesha has more than 17 years of experience in high-performance computing and scientific software development. He earned his MS and PhD in civil engineering at Old Dominion University. Prior to joining UChicago, he served as Director of Scientific Computing and Applications at the University of Minnesota Supercomputing Institute. In addition to overseeing strategic planning of HPC resources and leading annual procurement of supercomputing resources at MSI, Runesha created the MSI Application software development group and the MSI Scientific Data Management Laboratory to meet the evolving data management and database development needs of university researchers.

Prior to joining the University of Minnesota, he was a research scholar at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology developing parallel computing algorithms for engineering applications, a research associate for the Multidisciplinary Parallel-Vector Computer Center at Old Dominion University and an assistant professor at the University of Kinshasa.