Rachana Ananthakrishnan
Executive Director & Head of Products, Globus, University of Chicago
Rachana Ananthakrishnan is Executive Director & Head of Products at the University of Chicago, and has a Joint Staff Appointment at Argonne National Laboratory. In her role at the university, she leads the Globus (www.globus.org) department, which delivers a research IT platform to national and international research institutions. She currently serves on the Internet2 InCommon Steering Committee, Earth System Grid Federation Executive Committee and Scientific Advisory Board for National Microbiome Data Collaborative
Her work is focused on cyberinfrastructure for enabling research across a variety of domains, and she has lead security and data management for several NSF, DOE, and NIH funded initiatives. Rachana was member of the Globus Toolkit engineering team and customer engagement teams, leading the efforts in web services and security technologies. Rachana received her MS in Computer Science at Indiana University, Bloomington.
Kyle Chard
Research Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science, University of Chicago & Argonne National Laboratory
Kyle Chard is a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Chicago. He also holds a joint appointment at Argonne National Laboratory. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand in 2011. He is a member of the ACM and IEEE, received the IEEE TCHPC Award for Excellence for Early Career Researchers in HPC, was part of the Globus team that won an R&D100 award, and received the New Zealand Top Achiever Doctoral Scholarship. He co-leads the Globus Labs research group, which focuses on a broad range of research problems in data-intensive computing and research data management. He leads NSF-funded projects related to distributed and parallel computing, scientific reproducibility, research automation, and cost-aware use of cloud infrastructure.
Dr. Ian Foster
Arthur Holly Compton Distinguished Service Professor, Department of Computer Science, Distinguished Fellow and Senior Scientist,
MCS Division, Argonne
Dr. Foster is Senior Scientist and Distinguished Fellow, and also director of the Data Science and Learning Division, at Argonne National Laboratory, and the Arthur Holly Compton Distinguished Service Professor of Computer Science at the University of Chicago. His research deals with distributed, parallel, and data-intensive computing technologies, and innovative applications of those technologies to scientific problems in such domains as materials science, climate change, and biomedicine. He is a fellow of the AAAS, ACM, BCS, and IEEE, and an Office of Science Distinguished Scientists Fellow. His awards include the BCS Lovelace Medal and IEEE Babbage and Kanai awards.
Vas Vasiliadis
Chief Customer Officer, Globus, University of Chicago
Vas leads the customer team for Globus, an innovative software-as-a-service for research data management, developed and operated by the University of Chicago. He works with current and prospective users to grow adoption of the service and make it self-sustaining. Vas is also a lecturer in the Master’s Program in Computer Science, where he teaches courses on Cloud Computing and Product Management. Vas has 30 years of experience in operational and consulting roles, spanning strategy, marketing and technology. He has nurtured early stage companies into successful businesses, and consulted to companies on a wide range of strategic issues. Vas holds an MBA from the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and a BS in Electrical Engineering from the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa.