Dear Colleagues,
We are delighted to announce that Frank Würthwein, Ph.D., professor of Physics, lead of the Distributed High-Throughput Computing group at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), and a founding faculty member of the Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute, has been selected as the new Director of the San Diego Supercomputer Center. A member of the UC San Diego faculty since 2003, Professor Würthwein has served as a member of the SDSC Executive Team since 2015 and was recently serving as the interim director of the center.
Professor Würthwein’s work centers around international collaborations involving the Compact Muon Solenoid at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN – work that has involved thousands of physicists and engineers from more than 200 institutions in more than 40 countries. He is also the Executive Director of the Open Science Grid which provides high-throughput computational services for scientific institutions doing work in areas including high energy physics and structural biology. Würthwein was a Millikan Fellow and conducted post-doctoral research at Caltech, after earning his Ph.D. in Physics from Cornell University.
As the SDSC director, Würthwein will be responsible for the strategic direction and operational management of the center, leading its 260+ employees and volunteers, and managing the center’s more than $50 million annual budget. He will guide the center in creating high-performance, innovative computing infrastructure, applications and services to support the ever-growing variety of research within and beyond the STEM fields at UC San Diego, across SDSC’s national collaborations, and within the global community.
Additionally, he will work to expand the center’s involvement in emerging and future domains of supercomputing, identifying areas of investment for internal and outside partners, and fostering relationships with agencies, elected officials, organizations and others to forge collaborative and financial support pathways for the future.
With Professor Würthwein’s leadership and vision, the SDSC will continue to lead the way in groundbreaking research, innovation and invention, fulfilling its mission to “deliver lasting impact across the greater scientific community by creating innovative end-to-end computational and data solutions to meet the biggest research challenges of our time.”
We are confident that Professor Würthwein will guide the SDSC, one of the original National Science Foundation supercomputer centers, boldly into the future bolstered by his experience and commitment to global collaboration and innovation. Chancellor Khosla joins us in looking forward to working with Professor Würthwein in his new role.
Sincerely,
