CHAPEL HILL, NC – Dan Reed, Director of the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) and Chancellor’s Eminent Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, will oversee an expansion of RENCI and become the senior advisor for strategy and innovation to UNC-Chapel Hill Chancellor James Moeser.
In the new roles, effective in April, Reed will work with Moeser, the Provost, the Vice Chancellor for Research and Economic Development and UNC faculty to develop new multidisciplinary research initiatives. Moeser has set the goal of securing $1 billion in external funding for the UNC campus by 2015, and said Reed and RENCI will be instrumental in securing that funding.
“Dan Reed turns big ideas into reality,” Moeser said. “Since his arrival at Carolina, he has assembled world-class computing and technology resources that enhance this University’s ability to find innovative solutions to complex, multidisciplinary problems.”
The changes will increase RENCI’s staff by nearly 50 percent and will allow the institute to integrate research computing, storage capabilities and new technology initiatives from UNC’s Information Technology Services into an advanced research infrastructure to support the campus and RENCI’s statewide virtual organization.
Reed also will develop a RENCI presence on the UNC campus that will leverage UNC faculty expertise and advanced technologies to catalyze new multidisciplinary research opportunities. Called RENCI at UNC-Chapel Hill, the new facility will provide a wide range of technological resources to the university’s major collaborative research activities. RENCI at UNC-Chapel Hill also will be an integral component of the statewide RENCI organization, which fosters partnerships at campuses and in communities across the state, and will contribute to the institute’s ongoing statewide initiatives in such areas as disaster mitigation and response and personalized healthcare.
The expanded presence at Carolina will elevate RENCI into one of the premier technology and research centers in the nation, with a total staff of more than 100 professionals supported by some of the world’s most advanced computing capabilities.
“Our goal is the creation of wide-ranging initiatives – the kind of big research and academic ideas that will have transforming benefits for North Carolina and the world,” said Reed. “RENCI can become the foundation for these large-scale research projects. It can provide the technological infrastructure and expertise that is vital for making breakthrough discoveries.”
RENCI was founded in 2004 as major collaboration of UNC-Chapel Hill, Duke University, North Carolina State University and the state of North Carolina. Its mission is to foster a “renaissance” atmosphere by building multidisciplinary collaborations among research teams aimed at finding solutions to the most important problems of our time.
Reed is a member of President Bush’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, charged with providing advice on science and American competitiveness, and chair of the board of the Computing Research Association, which represents major academic departments and industrial research laboratories in North America. He chairs the policy board for the National Research Scientific Computing Center and is a member of the electronic records advisory board for the National Archives. He came to Carolina from the University of Illinois in 2004, where he was director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications.
