Larry L. Smarr

Larry Smarr is the founding Director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), a UC San Diego/UC Irvine partnership, and holds the Harry E. Gruber professorship in UCSD’s Department of Computer Science and Engineering. Before that he was the founding director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at UIUC. Smarr carried out theoretical, observational, and computational astrophysics for 25 years, has driven the early development of foundational components of our global cyberinfrastructure, and most recently has become a pioneer in the quantified self movement. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, as well as a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He served on the NASA Advisory Council to 4 NASA Administrators, was chair of the NASA Information Technology Infrastructure Committee and the NSF Advisory Committee on Cyberinfrastructure, and for 8 years he was a member of the NIH Advisory Committee to the NIH Director, serving 3 directors. He received his PhD in Physics at the University of Texas at Austin and spent three years as a Harvard Junior Fellow. Smarr can be followed on Twitter (@lsmarr) or on his portal http://lsmarr.calit2.net/.