Manchester Makes Three World Class Appointments in Computer Science

Date: May.30.07

Senior IBM employee Dr Sridhar Rajagopalan has been appointed Visiting Professor in the School of Computer Science. He was previously a visiting assistant professor at The University of California in Berkeley.

 

Dr Rajagopalan, a graph theoretician, who recently moved to Manchester from IBM’s Almaden Research Centre has made significant contributions to information discovery technology for IBM such as Clever, WebFountain and TREVI. He has now joined the Information Management Group in the School of Computer Science and is eager to contribute his expertise to Manchester’s research work.

 

Professor Pedro Mendes from The Virginia Bioinformatics Institute (VBI), recently accepted a Chair in Computational Systems Biology within The School of Computer Science. He will continue leading the COPASI project from Manchester, which now becomes a three-way collaboration with VBI and EML-Research (Heidelberg).

 

COPASI is a major software package that allows users to model, simulate and analyse biochemical and systems biology networks. He will be part of the Manchester Centre for Integrative Systems Biology, work closely with colleagues in the Manchester Interdisciplinary Biocentre (MIB) and will lead the development of research and training collaborations between MIB and VBI.

 

Professor Jack Dongarra is a world-leading researcher specialising in numerical algorithms in linear algebra, parallel computing, the use of advanced-computer architectures, programming methodology, and tools for parallel computers.

 

Professor Dongarra holds a University Distinguished Chair of Computer Science at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, and is also a Distinguished Scientist in the Mathematical Sciences Section at Oak Ridge National Laboratory has accepted a part-time Turing Fellowship in The Schools of Computer Science and Mathematics at Manchester.

 

Professor Dongarra’s research includes the development, testing and documentation of high quality mathematical software. He has contributed to the design and implementation of a number of open source software packages. He was awarded the IEEE Sid Fernbach Award in 2004 for his contributions in the application of high performance computers using innovative approaches. He is a Fellow of the AAAS, ACM, and the IEEE and a member of the National Academy of Engineering.