Robert Harrison, chemistry professor and UT-Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) joint faculty member, has been named the director of the Joint Institute for Computational Sciences (JICS), effective immediately.
Harrison became a joint appointee in 2002. He served as the technical group leader for the computational chemical sciences group in the ORNL Computer Science and Mathematics Division and a full professor of chemistry at UT Knoxville. He became an ORNL Corporate Fellow in 2005.
Before joining ORNL and UT Knoxville, he served as senior chief scientist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory’s Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory, where he was the lead architect of the NWChem high-performance computational chemistry software. Harrison won the internationally prestigious IEEE Sidney Fernbach Award in 2002 for his work.
He received his bachelor’s and doctorate degrees at the University of Cambridge in Cambridge, England.
Harrison brings unique and extensive experience in computational chemistry, modeling and simulation, and academic vision to the JICS director position.
UT Knoxville and ORNL established the JICS to advance scientific discovery and state-of-the-art engineering and to further knowledge of computational modeling and simulation by:
• Taking full advantage of petascale and beyond computers housed at ORNL
• Educating a new generation of scientists and engineers well-versed
in the application of computational modeling and simulation for solving the most challenging scientific and engineering problems.
The JICS team includes UT-ORNL Joint Faculty appointees, JICS Research Affiliates, postdoctoral fellows, graduate students, and administrative staff. JICS Joint Faculty members hold a dual position as faculty members within a University of Tennessee department and as staff scientists within an ORNL research group. JICS also has scientific support staff to aid JICS affiliates and students in their use of leadership-class computing.