Stanley C. Ahalt became RENCI director in September 2009 after serving as executive director of the Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC) from 2003 to 2009 and as a professor in the department of electrical and computer engineering at The Ohio State University for 22 years. In addition to directing RENCI, Ahalt is a professor in the department of computer science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Since coming to RENCI, Ahalt has increased RENCI’s sponsored research portfolio and solidified RENCI’s partnerships with the UNC School of Medicine, the UNC School of Information and Library Sciences, UNC’s department of computer science, and various research units at North Carolina State and Duke universities. He is a member of the Board for National Lambda Rail, a major network for advanced research and innovation, and a member of Microsoft’s Technical Computing Advisory Committee. He will begin a term as president of the Board of the Great Lakes Consortium for Petascale Computation (GLCPC) in fall 2011 and currently chairs the GLCPC Allocation Committee.

Ahalt chairs the subcommittee on regional computing centers for the National Science Foundation Taskforce on High Performance Computing and was a key contributor to the NSF Data and Visualization and Campus Bridging Task Force reports, two of the six reports that comprise the NSF-wide Advisory Committee for Cyberinfrastructure reports published in April, 2011.  He chaired the Coalition for Academic Scientific Computation (CASC) in 2009 and 2010 and has been a member of the Council on Competitiveness High Performance Computing Advisory Committee since 2004.

While at OSC, Ahalt launched several model programs, including Blue Collar Computing, a national program to bring high performance computing to a wide spectrum of industries and applications, and OSCnet, a leading high-speed research network for K-12 schools, higher education and economic development. He also served as co-chair of the Ohio Broadband Council, the coordinating body for the state’s initiative to extend the reach of the Broadband Ohio Network.

Ahalt’s research expertise involves neural networks, high performance computing, signal/image/video processing and object identification. He has authored or co-authored more than 120 technical papers and been principal investigator or co-principal investigator on research grants totaling nearly $17 million. Ahalt also served as the academic lead in the area of signal and image processing for the Department of Defense High Performance Computing Modernization Program.

As a member of the Ohio State faculty, Ahalt co-founded the Information Processing Systems Laboratory. He received the OSU Lumley Research Award in 1997 and the OSU College of Engineering Research Award in 1999.

A native of Virginia, Ahalt holds a Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering from Clemson University and master’s and bachelor’s degrees in electrical engineering from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.

Invited Presentations /  Professional Offices and Services

Recognition and Appointments / Publications

Population Informatics Research Group / The Social Genome Project

Contact Information:

ahalt at renci.org

919-445-9641

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