Biographical sketch

Michael is currently Principal Computational Scientist at the Center for Advanced Computing Research (CACR) at the California Institute of Technology. His research is centered on the design and implementation of pyre, an architectural framework, integration platform and problem-solving environment for scientific computations. Pyre provides the software backbone for a number of large-scale research efforts that involve high performance computing.

He is a Co-PI and the Chief Architect at the Caltech PSAAP Center, a five year program funded by the DOE to integrate theory, experiment and computation to advance the state of the art in predictive computations. This program is the descendant of the Center for the Dynamic Response of Materials, where Michael served as Co-PI and Chief Software Architect for ten years, an ASC/ASAP center of excellence funded by DOE at roughly $4.5M/year with the aim of leveraging the largest computational facilities available to improve our modeling capabilities of materials under extreme loads.

Michael served as the Chief Architect at the Center for Computational Infrastructure in Geodynamics (CIG), an effort to consolidate the entire set of state of the art codes produced and used by geophysicists. The goal is to provide a uniform integration platform for all these codes and improve their quality by employing modern software engineering practices. The center was originally funded by the NSF at the level of $6.67M over five years and was renewed in 2011 for a second five-year period.

In 2007, the NSF awarded $12.8M over five years in order to build the next generation of software for the data analysis of neutron scattering experiments (DANSE). This effort was centered at the Spallation Neutron Source, a DOE facility at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

In 2003, Michael helped found ParaSim, Inc., a company that specializes in producing commercial quality software packages that employ state of the art algorithms to model multi-scale, multi-physics processes. The company is providing technical know-how and simulation capabilities to a wide variety of industrial partners and has successfully completed a number of Phase I and II SBIR/STTR awards. Under Michael's leadership, the company employs more than a dozen people, most of whom hold doctorates in a variety of disciplines, and is in the late stages of bringing to market healmesh, a state of the art package for improving the quality of finite element meshes.

Previously, Michael spent a year as a consultant for the Computing Division at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory where he provided mentorship and tools to help manage the transition from FORTRAN to C++ for the next generation data analysis software.

Prior to that, he was the Director of Technology at ParaSoft Corporation, where he was responsible for the company's software development effort. In addition, he coauthored the commercially successful development tools Insure++ and CodeWizard. His work on the latter led to US Pat. 5860011, which was issued in January of 1999.

He also spent two years as a Professor of Physics at the Southern Methodist University in Dallas, until the closing of the SSC.

Research interests

Computational science, mathematical software, software development tools and problem-solving environments for high performance computing.

Experience

Education

Last update: 29 June 2012