PRESS RELEASE

ACADEMIC LEADERS EMBRACE THE IMPORTANCE OF CYBERINFRASTRUCTURE

November 28, 2008

“Leadership in cyberinfrastructure may well become the major determinant in measuring pre-eminence in higher education among nations.”  So says Dr. Arden Bement, Jr., Director of the National Science Foundation.  UW-Milwaukee’s Hefter Center was the setting for a meeting on Tuesday, November 25 between key leaders of the area’s academic and research institutions – Marquette University, The Medical College of Wisconsin, Milwaukee School of Engineering, Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin, the Milwaukee Institute and University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee.  The subject was the criticality of cyberinfrastructure for academic research.  The keynote speaker for the event was Jim Bottum, Vice Provost and Chief Information Officer for Computing and Information Technology at Clemson University.

In the first 18 months of his tenure at Clemson, Mr. Bottum led that university’s successful effort to become one of the Top 100 supercomputing sites in the world (#62) by building a state-of-the-art cyberinfrastructure for education and research.  Before moving to Clemson, Mr. Bottum was Purdue University’s first Chief Information Officer, helping the university and surrounding area achieve international recognition in cyberinfrastructure and High Performance Computing.  Prior to Purdue, Mr. Bottum was the Executive Director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. 

Mr. Bottum’s presentation was sponsored by SeWHiP, the Southeast Wisconsin High Performance computing interest group made up of members of the academic institutions noted above.  The purpose of the meeting was to highlight awareness of the gaps in Southeast Wisconsin’s cyberinfrastructure and the related impacts on area academic institutions, as well as the region’s economic development.  Dr. Craig Struble of Marquette University gave a presentation to the group as well, highlighting SeWHiP’s accomplishments and direction.  Milwaukee Institute Operations Director Beth Furumo was the event coordinator.  Those interested in further information may contact [email protected].