Ed Seidel

Ed Seidel is the President of the University of Wyoming.

Previously, Seidel was the the vice president for economic development and innovation for the University of Illinois System. In this role, he oversaw economic development and innovation activities that build on the University of Illinois System’s education and research capacity. As a member of the university’s senior leadership team, he has built and supported programs that engage university, public and private partners -- strengthening the links among higher education, research and business to stimulate economic development across the state. He oversees the system’s commercialization pipeline, including the Offices of Technology Management at the Universities of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Chicago, and the early-stage technology investment firm Illinois Ventures, which has catalyzed over $1.7 billion in venture funding for companies.

Seidel’s long record of leadership experience includes more than three years as director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he was among the original co-principal investigators for Blue Waters, a federally funded project that brought one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers to Urbana-Champaign.

Previously, he was the senior vice president for research and innovation for the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology in Moscow, Russia, in collaboration with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Before that, he directed the Office of Cyberinfrastructure and led the Directorate of Mathematical and Physical Sciences as National Science Foundation assistant director. He also led the Center for Computation & Technology at Louisiana State University and directed the numerical relativity group at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute) in Germany.

Seidel received his Ph.D. in relativistic astrophysics from Yale University, earned a master’s degree in physics at the University of Pennsylvania, and received a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and physics from the College of William and Mary. He is Founder Professor in the Department of Physics, professor in the Department of Astronomy and research professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has supervised dozens of graduate students and postdoctoral researchers in physics, astronomy, computer science and other disciplines, and has published about 200 papers in professional journals.