James C. Wilgenbusch, PhD

James (Jim) Wilgenbusch is the Director of Research Computing in the Office of the Vice President for Research at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Jim is responsible for the strategic direction and leadership of the three major computational research areas under the Office of the Vice President for Research: the Minnesota Supercomputing Institute (MSI), the University of Minnesota Informatics Institute (UMII), and U-Spatial. In this role he leads University-wide initiatives, partners with collegiate senior administrators and works with faculty and administrators to shape research computing at the University of Minnesota, ensures the excellence of existing activities, and facilitates the implementation of new programs.  Jim is also involved at a national level in the promotion and development of research cyberinfrastructure and plays a variety of roles in organizations such as the Coalition for Academic Scientific Computation (CASC), Campus Research Computing Consortium (CARCC), and the National Science Foundation’s Big Data Regional Innovation Hubs.  Jim maintains research activities in the study and implementation of models, methods and software used in phylogenetic inference and for over 15 years has been an invited faculty member at workshops and seminars on this same topic. Prior to coming to the University of Minnesota, Jim was a Senior Research Associate in the Department of Scientific Computing and the founding director of Florida State University's Research Computing Center. While at FSU Jim co-founded the Sunshine State Education and Research Computing Alliance (SSERCA) to bring together Florida's geographically distributed academic organizations and high-end compute and data storage resources in order to better support statewide research and create regional synergies.