Frank Würthwein

Frank Würthwein, Ph.D., is the director of the San Diego Supercomputer Center. He assumed the role July 1, 2021, upon former long-time director Michael Norman’s return to full-time faculty member in the UC San Diego Department of Physics.

Würthwein is the lead of Distributed High-Throughput Computing at SDSC, a faculty member in the UC San Diego Department of Physics and a founding faculty member of the Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute on campus. His research focuses on experimental particle physics, and in particular the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment at the Large Hadron Collider. He continues to serve, as he has for many years, as executive director of the Open Science Grid (OSG), the premiere national cyberinfrastructure for distributed high-throughput computing.

Würthwein received his Ph.D. from Cornell in 1995. After holding appointments at Caltech and MIT, he joined the UC San Diego faculty in 2003. His research interests in particle physics include the search for dark matter, supersymmetry and electroweak symmetry breaking.

As an experimentalist, Würthwein is also interested in instrumentation and data analysis. Over the last few years this has meant developing, deploying and operating a worldwide distributed computing system for high-throughput computing with large data volumes.