Cheatham named director for CHPC
University Information Technology (UIT) is pleased to announce that after a competitive search, Professor Thomas E. Cheatham III has been named director of the Center for High Performance Computing (CHPC), which provides large-scale computer and networking resources to facilitate advances in academic disciplines that require computing and network capabilities beyond those existing in individual colleges, departments, and groups.
“We are extremely pleased that Tom Cheatham is assuming this campus research computing leadership position in addition to his ongoing faculty duties in Medicinal Chemistry,” said Steve Corbató, the U’s interim CIO. “Tom is a widely respected computational scientist and a long-time faculty user of CHPC, and he brings an impressive record of leadership in numerous campus and national cyberinfrastructure oversight groups.”
Cheatham has long been a user and advocate of CHPC, and for many years has served on various IT advisory committees at the U, including the CHPC User Advisory Committee. He chairs the U’s Information Technology Research Portfolio, serves on the UU Operational IT committee, chairs the College of Pharmacy Computer Committee, is Director of Graduate Studies for the Department of Medicinal Chemistry, is a member of the Academic Senate, and was recently promoted to full professor of Medicinal Chemistry in the College of Pharmacy.
He performs extensive service related to information technology outside the University on review panels for the NSF (CHI, ACI), NIH (MSFG “Computational Biophysics” Study Section Member) and National Academies (Anton Review Panel). This includes serving as Chair of the NSF’s eXtreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) User Advisory Committee, as a member of both the XSEDE Science Advisory Board and XSEDE Senior Management Team, and more recently as an XSEDE Domain Champion. He also serves as a member of the University of Illinois Blue Waters Sustained Petascale Computing Resource’s Science and Engineering Team Advisory Committee and as a member of the Scientific Advisory Committee of the Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing.
Cheatham’s collaborative NSF- and NIH-funded research efforts, with over 100 publications to date, center on the application of biomolecular simulation methods to understand nucleic acid and protein structure, dynamics, function and interactions with their environment. The Cheatham Group is one of the core Amber software development teams, using large allocations of heterogeneous and high performance computational resources from XSEDE and Blue Waters.
Prior to coming to the U as a faculty member in 2000, Cheatham was a National Research Council Research Associate in the Laboratory of Biophysical Chemistry in the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute at the National Institutes of Health where he worked with Dr. Bernie Brooks. He received his Ph.D. in pharmaceutical chemistry in 1997 from the University of California at San Francisco in the laboratory of the late Peter Kollman. Cheatham worked with specialized parallel computer resources for a few years as a programmer/analyst at the Aiken Computation Lab at Harvard after earning a bachelor’s degree at Middlebury College majoring in mathematics, computer science, and chemistry (honors).