MSI is very happy to report that Jorge Vinals has accepted the offer to become the next MSI Director. He will also become a professor of physics. Jorge will assume the directorship on August 1, 2010.
Jorge is currently the director of CLUMEQ, a Canadian Supercomputing Center led by McGill University with sites in Montreal and Quebec City. CLUMEQ provides high-performance computation to Canadian academic institutions. Their newest compute cluster, "Colosse," is located in Quebec and came in at 63 in the November 2009 TOP500 list. A second, larger cluster will be commissioned this summer in Montreal. Jorge is therefore very familiar with many of the opportunities and challenges encountered in organizations such as MSI.
Jorge has been a professor of physics and Canada Research Chair in Nonequilibrium Materials at McGill. He joined McGill in 2004 as the first director of the McGill Institute of Advanced Materials before becoming the director of CLUMEQ in 2007. Prior to that, he was a Program Director for Materials Science Research at the School of Computational Science and Information Technology of Florida State University, and a staff member in the Supercomputer Computations Research Institute of the university, a precursor to the School. The Institute operated as a US DOE National Supercomputing Facility.
His field of specialty is nonlinear science with applications to nonequilibrium phenomena, materials science, and biophysics. He has also held a senior NIH fellowship at the Laboratory of Computational Genomics at the Donald Danforth Center in St. Louis. He has a broad scientific background, and experience in funding of large, interdisciplinary research activities.