IU Networking at Indiana University
International Networking

Ernet Small

Mr. B Asvija , holds a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and Engineering and is currently working as the Project Leader for the Service Oriented Architecture team at Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), Bangalore. His areas of research include Service Oriented Computing, Grid Computing, Parallel computing, Debugging and Profiling. He has played an active role in design & operations of the Garuda Grid, the National grid computing initiative of India. He is actively involved in the grid interoperability projects with attempts to link the European and US grids with the Indian Garuda grid. He has authored and presented research papers in many international conferences.

Dr.K.V.S. Badarinath, is the Head, Atmospheric Science Section, National Remote Sensing Centre, Department of Space, Govt. of India, Hyderabad. He holds an M.Sc in Physics with Electronics Specialization; Ph.D in Physics from Indian Institute of Technology, Madras (1984) and Post Graduate Diploma in Computer Science from University of Hyderabad (1997). Dr. Badarinath has been Principal Investigator in projects related to climate change, land surface processes studies, Aerosol Radiative Forcing over Indian Region (ARFI), atmospheric corrections to satellite data, environmental impact assessment studies and land use/land cover mapping using satellite data. Under the ISRO-NASA/NOAA collaboration program he implemented algorithms for forest fire detection over the Indian region which resulted in operational fire monitoring. He received International START Visiting Scientist award to work at Colorado State University, USA in 1997 and has published 120 research papers in peer reviewed International Journals, 75 papers in National Journals, 6 Chapters in Books, edited three books and is co-author of a recent book entitled “Dust Storm Identification using Remote Sensing”. He has provided guidance to nine Ph.D students and two of his scholars received young scientist awards. Dr.K.V.S. Badarinath is a Fellow of the Indian Geophysical Union(IGU) and the Andhra Pradesh Academy of Sciences. He is a member of Indian Society of Remote Sensing(ISRS) and Indian Meteorological Society(IMS).

Dr Sanghamitra Bandyopadhyay is a Professor in the Machine Intelligence Unit, Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, India. Her education has been at Presidency College, Calcutta, the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kharagpur and Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata. She has worked in Los Alamos National Laboratory (Los Alamos, USA), University of New South Wales (Sydney, Australia), University of Texas (Arlington, USA), University of Maryland Baltimore County (Baltimore, USA), Fraunhofer Institute (Sankt Augustin, Germany), Tsinghua University (Beijing, China) and La Sapeinza University of Rome (Rome, Italy). Sanghamitra has also visited Nice University (Nice, France), Monash University (Melbourne, Australia), University of Illinois (Chicago, USA) and Imperial College (London, UK), NUS and NTU (Singapore), University of Aizu (Japan), Open University, University Kebangsaan Malaysia (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia) and ICTP, Italy. She was the Program Co-Chair of the First International Conference on Pattern Recognition and Machine Intelligence, PReMI'05 held in ISI during December 18-22, 2005. She has edited a conference proceedings, three edited volumes and an authored book. She has served as the guest editor of special issues of the IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics - B (Special issue on Distributed and Mobile Data Mining), and IETE Journal of Research (Special issue on Evolutionary Computation in Engineering Sciences). She is the recipient of several prestigious awards that include Humboldt Fellowship, Swarnajayanti Fellowship in Engineering Sciences from DST, Young Scientist Medal from both Indian National Science Academy, and Indian Science Congress, Young Engineers Award from Indian National Academy of Engineering, Dr. Shanker Dayal Sharma Gold Medal, IIT Kharagpur and Institute Silver Medal, IIT Kharagpur, and Prof. A.K. Chowdhury Memorial Award, Calcutta University. She was recently awarded with the prestigious Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar award in Engineering Science, 2010.

Dr. Sorav Bansal is currently Assistant Professor at IIT Delhi and actively works in the areas of dynamic code optimization, security, concurrency and testing. He received his B.Tech. from IIT Delhi in 2001 and Ph.D. from Stanford University in 2008.

William K. Barnett is the Senior Manager for Life Sciences in Research Technologies and an Associate Director of the Pervasive Technology Institute at Indiana University. He is also the Director of the Advanced IT Core and an Adjunct Associate Professor in the Medical and Molecular Genetics Department at the IU School of Medicine. As the Director of Information Infrastructures at the Indiana CTSI, Dr. Barnett oversees strategy and development for the Indiana CTSI HUB. Dr. Barnett has a long history of leadership roles in academia, including CIO of the Field Museum where he led integrative digital library and phylogenetic analysis technology programs.

Chaitan Baru is a Distinguished Scientist at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, UC San Diego, where he also leads the Advanced CyberInfrastructure Development (ACID) Group. Baru’s research interests are in data-intensive computing, design and performance of large-scale data management systems, scientific data management, data integration, and cloud computing for data intensive applications. His group has been involved in cyberinfrastructure (CI) research and development across a wide range of science disciplines including, Earth Sciences, Ecology, Hydrology, Earthquake Engineering, Bioinformatics and Biomedicine. Baru has served as the Project Director of the Geosciences Network (GEON, www.geongrid.org ); CI Lead for the Tropical Ecology, Assessment and Monitoring network (TEAM, http://teamnetwork.org ); PI of the CUAHSI Hydrologic Information System (HIS, http://www.cuahsi.org/his.html ); member of the founding Senior Management Team of the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) and co-PI of the NEON CI Testbed; and, Director, NEESit for the NSF’s Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulations. He is currently co-PI of the NIH-funded CYCORE project (Cyberinfrastructure for Comparative Effectiveness Research) and a member of the How Much Information project, which is based at the School of International Relations and Pacific Studies (IRPS) at UCSD, and sponsored by an industry consortium. Prior to joining SDSC in 1996, Baru was at IBM where he led one of the development teams for DB2 Parallel Edition Version 1 (released Dec 1995). Prior to that, he served on the faculty of the EECS Department, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Baru received his B.Tech in Electronics Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, and M.E. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Florida, Gainesville, where he also received an Outstanding Master’s Thesis award.

Dr. Shrikant Bharadwaj is a Scientist at the Hyderabad Eye Research Foundation (HERF) and an Associate Professor of Optometry at the Bausch and Lomb School of Optometry (BLSO), L V Prasad Eye Institute, Hyderabad. Dr. Bharadwaj heads the Visual Optics and Psychophysics laboratory at HERF and also teaches Optometry courses at BLSO. He is also a member of the strategic planning committee of BLSO. Dr. Bharadwaj received his Undergraduate degree in Optometry from the Elite School of Optometry, Birla Institute of Technology and Science and a PhD degree in Vision Science from the University of California, Berkeley. He worked as post-doctoral fellow at the Indiana University School of Optometry before joining the L V Prasad Eye Institute. Dr. Bharadwaj’s research is directed at understanding how humans achieve clear and single binocular vision of their 3D environment and how the visual experience breaks down in the presence of developmental pathologies. Dr. Bharadwaj is a member of the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology, American Academy of Optometry and the Phi Beta Kappa Society’s Alpha chapter. He has been awarded the Fight for Sight post-doctoral fellowship and is currently funded through the Ramalingaswmi fellowship offered by the Department of Biotechnology, Govt. of India and a fast-track grant through the Department of Science and Technology, Govt. of India.

Dipankar Bhattacharya is a Senior Professor of Astrophysics at the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics, Pune. Prior to joining IUCAA in 2007, he spent 20 years as a member of the faculty of the Raman Research Institute, Bangalore. Prof. Bhattacharya obtained his PhD in Physics from Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore and carried out post-doctoral research at the University of Amsterdam. His current interests include the astrophysics of compact stars, supernovae and gamma ray bursts, as well as astronomical imaging techniques, data pipelinining, archiving, visualization and high performance computing.

Nisha Chandran works for the Open Source Drug Discovery out of Jawaharlal Nehru University leading projects based on Ligand Based Drug Discovery. Besides currently coordinating an on-line exercise on this topic from the OSDD portal, she is one of the project managers for the OSDD program, and was a lead organiser of the Connect-to-Decode conference held in Delhi in April, 2010. She has a Masters Degree in Biotechnology.

Subrata Chattopadhyay currently heads the System Engineering and Networking Group at C-DAC, Knowledge Park, Bangalore and also the Principal Investigator of Garuda – the national grid computing initiative of India. He was involved in setting up the PARAM Padma, the first Indian supercomputing facility listed from India. He was also involved in setting up of nation wide high speed communication fabric of GARUDA and deploying grid middleware across various platforms of supercomputers. From C-DAC, he is the technical contact for the EUIndia Grid project that interconnect Indian grid project – Garuda with the European grid initiatives – EGEE. Before joining C-DAC, he worked at Mirronex Technologies Pvt. Ltd., HealthScribe India, and Chemical Industries Consulting Bureau in various IT positions. He was in JSW Ltd. for setting up IT systems in a green field project and National Metallurgical Laboratory, Jamshedpur as a Scientist at Computer Applications Division. He has authored many technical papers and lectured in many national and international conferences. Subrata has a bachelors in Engineering degree from NIT, Durgapur, Masters from IIT, Kanpur and PhD from University of British Columbia, Vancouver,Canada. He brings more than 20 years of experience both from IT industry and research organizations. His major areas of interest include high performance computing, grid/cloud computing and process modeling and simulations.

Shubha Chaudhuri has a Phd in Linguistics. She has been on the staff of the Archives and Research Centre for Ethnomusicology of the American Institute of Indian Studies since its inception in 1982, and Director since 1985. She has also been actively involved in training in the fields of ethnomusicology and audio visual archiving. In the field of audio visual archiving her major interests have been database applications, the needs of research archives and issues of Intellectual Property Rights. Shubha Chaudhuri is member of the Executive Board of the Musicological Society of India, is National Representative for India to the ICTM (International Council of Traditional Music), and has been actively involved with the International Association of Sound and Audio Visual Archives ( IASA), serving as Vice President and the Society of Ethnomusicology. She has been a consultant for the Ford Foundation in the area of audio visual archiving for projects in India, Indonesia and Sudan. Her fieldwork has been has been in Western Rajasthan in India and current research interests are in the area of Archive and Community Partnerships in Rajasthan and Goa. She is also consulting with the WIPO Creative Heritage and has worked with UNESCO for the Cultural Mapping Project for India, and Interactive Ethnographic Museums.

Greg Cole is the Principal Investigator and developer of the Global Ring Network for Advanced Applications Development (GLORIAD) and of the more recent GLORIAD-Taj effort. Greg has an extensive background in global advanced networking, having developed and managed the multi-national GLORIAD and predecessor US-Russia MIRnet and NaukaNet programs since 1997. His experience dates back 15-years and includes cross-cultural social networking, education, outreach and training, local community network infrastructure development, and global R&E cyberinfrastructure development and management In addition to $18M+ funding from the NSF, Greg’s global networking initiatives have been supported by NATO, US Department of State, USAID, Eurasia Foundation, Ford Foundation, Sun Microsystems, Cisco and others. Under his leadership, GLORIAD has developed and maintained a global, highly federated and decentralized management and a vast public/private partnership connecting science communities around the world.

Dr. Hemant Darbari has been involved for more than twenty five years in the fields of Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing (NLP), Machine assisted Translation (MT), Information Extraction and Information Retrieval (IE/IR), Intelligent Language Tutoring systems, Speech Technology (Automatic Speech Recognition & Text to Speech System), Mobile computing, Decision Support System and Simulations, High Performance Computing and Security. At present, he is Executive Director, C-DAC, Pune and Programme Coordinator & Head - Applied Artificial Intelligence Group (AAIG), Advanced Computing Training School (ACTS), and E-Governance Cell. He was one of the founding members of C-DAC. In his role and capacity of Program Co-coordinator of Applied Artificial Intelligence Group (AAIG) of C-DAC, he has to his credit successful implementation of projects like MANTRA (Machine assisted Translation Tool), LILA (Learn Indian Languages through Artificial intelligence), ANVESHAK (NLP based Information Extraction system), Shrutlekhan (A Hindi Speech to Text System), Shruti-Drishti (Web Browsing through Listening for Visually Impaired) and PRAVACHAK (Hindi Text to Speech System) and so on. He is the Principal/ Chief Investigator of the projects in the state-of-the-art technologies from Ministry of Home Affairs (Department of Official Language), Ministry of Communications & Information Technology (Department of Information Technology), Ministry of Defense, RajyaSabha Secretariat. Dr. Darbari has also executed the EILMT project as Consortia Leader of 11 institutes sponsored by DIT, MC&IT, GoI. He was also visiting Professor at University of Pennsylvania and Louisiana State Universities, USA. Dr. Darbari holds a doctoral degree and M.Tech in Computer Science from Roorkee University and has to his credit, 85 Technical Papers that have been published in national & international Journals & Conference Proceedings. Dr. Darbari is a recipient of the prestigious "Computerworld Smithsonian Award Medal" from the Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC for his outstanding work on MANTRA-Machine Assisted Translation Tool which is also a part of "The 1999 Innovation Collection" at National Museum of American History, Washington DC, USA.

Dai Davies has been General Manager of DANTE since 1993. He has degrees in engineering and computer science from Cambridge University, and has considerable experience of the translation between technology and service in a broad range of communications activities. In his role as General Manager, he has been actively involved in a number of cooperative actions with NRENs in other world regions, under the auspices of the European Commission and the aid budget. This has included Southern Mediterranean (EUMEDCONNECT), Latin America (ALICE) and South East Asia (TEIN).

Mr. Prasad Dharmavaram is an R&D Manager in the vSphere product development group at VMware Bangalore. He manages and leads a team of developers working on Virtualization and Cloud Computing infrastructure products. Prasad has over 15 years of experience in the software industry. Prior to joining VMware, Prasad worked in Sun Microsystems, California, for eleven years in the Solaris High Availability Clusters R&D group. He worked in various management and technical roles at Sun, designing and developing key components of the cluster operating system. Prasad was also a core contributor and a community leader in the Open HA Cluster community in Open Solaris. Prasad has an M.Tech in Computer Science and a B.Tech in Electronics from Mysore university.

Shri Dhekne is currently working as a Raja Ramanna Fellow at BARC, after superannuating as Associate Director, E&I Group, BARC on September 30, 2007 Mumbai. He has made invaluable contributions in the field of High Performance, Distributed, Grid Computing and information security systems for more than three decades in DAE. He is a renowned national as well as International expert in these areas. His major contributions include the design and development of various models of ANUPAM parallel processing systems- (wherein the technology to the country was denied), High resolution Tiled Graphics System, building layered and highly secure information architecture, world wide LHC computing grid, EU-INDIA grid and DAE grid. He was awarded the Indian Nuclear Society Award INS-2001, presented by Honorable Prime Minister of India. He received in 2007 DAE Group Achievement Award for his individual contribution & excellent teamwork for Anupam Supercomputer & Intelligent Security Systems based on indigenous technology. He is a fellow of National Academy of Engineers (FNAE) and was member of sectional committee II on Computer & Information Technologies at INAE. He was AICTE-INAE Distinguished Visiting Professor of INAE from 2006-2009. He is serving as a Scientific Consultant to Principle Scientific Advisor to Government of India. He is also involved in the conceptualization, design & realization of National Knowledge Network (NKN), a nationwide high-speed Education & Research Network and a lead person in implementing Grid applications on NKN.

Chris Elvidge Physical scientist – U.S. Department of Commerce, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), National Geophysical Data Center (NGDC). Elvidge leads the Earth Observation Group (EOG) in the Solar and Terrestrial Physics Division. NGDC is one of two long term archive sites for all NOAA satellite data. Elvidge's group has responsibility for the DMSP (Defense Meteorological Satellite Program) long term archive. DMSP is unique for its ability to collect low light imagery of the Earth at night. For the past sixteen years Elvidge has lead the development of algorithms to map nighttime lights with DMSP images and the development of applications for these maps. EOG's flagship product is an annual cloud-free composite of nighttime lights at one km^2 resolution. Current EOG projects include satellite monitoring of gas flaring in oil and gas fields in sixty countries, construction of a global GDP map, and the analysis of electrification rates in more than 200 countries. Elvidge's group provides a near real time subscription service for DMSP data of India to the India National Remote Sensing Centre. This service has been operating continuously since 2002. Elvidge graduated with a Ph.D. in Applied Earth Sciences from Stanford University. His post-doctoral work was at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Prior to arriving at NGDC he was an Associate Professor in Biological Sciences at the Desert Research Institute in Reno, Nevada and a visiting scientist in the Global Change Research Program at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in Washington, DC. He has an extensive set of publications ( http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/dmsp/pubs.php ).

Dr Ian Fore leads Biorepository and Pathology Informatics at the US National Cancer Institute's Center for Biomedical Informatics and Information Technology and the caBIG Tissue Bank and Pathology Tools workspace. The program has developed caTissue, the Common Biorepository Model and the Biospecimen Research Database to address the key role of biospecimens in cancer research. Previously Dr Fore worked on drug discovery informatics at Wyeth Research and Johnson & Johnson Pharmaceutical R&D including developing global databases for research data. More recently he was a product manager at Celera Genomics responsible for integrating Celera's informatics systems with those of its customers. Prior to leaving the lab for an informatics career Ian gained his D.Phil. in Physiology at the University of Oxford, England and subsequently worked as a Research Pharmacologist.

Ms. Akila Ganesan is the General Manager of Sankara Nethralaya Eye Hospital and the Registrar of The Sankara Nethralaya Academy, the academic wing of Sankara Nethralaya. As General Manager, Ms Akila is responsible for the overall administration of Sankara Nethralaya. She heads a team of 950 employees working with different departments of the hospital including Purchase & Stores, Human Resources, Optometry, Nursing, Optical Services, Laboratory Services, Internal Services (Housekeeping, Transport and Security), Maintenance (Civil and Electrical), Finance, Fundraising and Biomedical Engineering. As part of the management, she oversees and approves all expenses, funding and purchases of the Hospital and the Academy. She is spearheading the setting up of the Sankara Nethralaya Academy. This project was launched in January 2010. Its main objective is to impart knowledge through instruction courses training classes and usher in newer training / teaching methodologies including the use of Information Technology (online certification programs, webinars etc). Since its inception, the Academy has launched 4 certificate and fellowship programs, and has recently go affiliation with the Dr. MGR Medical University for 6 Diploma and Degree programs including a Masters in Health Informatics & Telemedicine. The Academy is looking for partners who would join hands in its endeavour to spread education and training in healthcare, specifically ophthalmic healthcare. Ms. Akila is an Optometrist from the Elite School Optometry. After tenure of 5 years as Clinical Optometrist and Faculty at Sankara Nethralaya, she moved to Industry and worked with Novartis Pharmaceutical Ltd, for a period of 7 years, for 2 years as Regulatory Manager for the Pharma business and for 5 years as Product Manager in charge of Sales and Marketing of Ophthalmic Pharmaceuticals. Returning back to Sankara Nethralaya in 2004, she held the position as Deputy General Manager – Corporate Development and Communications before taking over as General Manager in 2007. She holds a certification in Financial Management from Loyola Institute of Business Administration.

Dr. B.K. Gairola has been involved for more than twenty five years in propagating IT culture among top level decision makers, both political and executive of this country. This has helped in building an environment conducive to improved decision making through the use of IT in government. At present, he is Director General, National Informatics Centre (NIC). He is responsible for conceiving, designing and implementing various large IT based projects for Government of India, with large citizen interfaces. He also evolved the concept of a common “National Super Highway in Cyber Space in India” with an objective to help the nation to leap frog into the ‘Knowledge Society’. The multi gigabit network called National knowledge Network (NKN) is being implemented with the assistance of NIC. Conceptualization, building and induction of on-line information systems in various fields like passport, immigration, vehicle management, identification system have been his significant contributions. Realizing the virtual stronghold of the developed countries on the specialized core software technologies like CAD, CAM/CIM & GIS, Dr. Gairola worked towards building self sufficiency in these technologies. He has been deeply involved in creation of effective Cyber Security environment, both with a view to give technical and legal frame work and also to build secure Cyber infrastructure for effective propagation of E- Governance. Dr. Gairola holds a doctoral degree and M.Tech in Computer Science from IIT, Kanpur and has published papers and reports in the area of computer science, IT and e-Governance and presented the same at national and international conferences. Presently, he holds the chairmanship of National Centre for Trade Information (NCTI); and is Member of Executive Committee, National Science Centre; Board of Directors, NICSI; and Fellow of the Indian National Academy of Sciences, India.

Prof. Indira Ghosh is Dean of School of Information Technology in Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi. She got her Ph.D from Indian Institute of Science Bangalore in Molecular Biophysics and there after she did post-doctoral work at University of Houston, Texas, USA. She has worked in IICB, a CSIR Institute(1988-90) before joining the pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca during 1990-2003 and has teaching experience in various academic institutes in India and abroad( 2003-2010). She has published number of papers. Her research area of interest is understanding of disease like Malaria, Tuberculosis and Diabetes using Bio and chemo informatics. She is recipient of Fulbright Scholar (Senior) awarded by U.S.E.F.I. 1983 to 1986 and Robert Welch Foundation Fellow at the University of Houston, Texas, 1983 to 1986.

Steven Gottlieb is a Distinguished Professor of Physics at Indiana University where he has been on the faculty for 25 years. His research is in elementary particle theory where he specializes in the area of lattice QCD, a nonperturbative approach to the theory of the strong interaction. His work has concentrated on the spectrum of strongly interacting particles, weak matrix elements that are necessary for the interpretation of numerous experiments, and the properties of hot strongly interacting matter, i.e., the quark-gluon plasma. Gottlieb is also interested in high performance computing and has been a major use of DOE and NSF supercomputers for nearly three decades. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and Associate Editor-in-Chief of Computing in Science and Engineering. With Rubin Landau, he is co-editor of a series of books in computational physics. (Let him know if you are interested in writing a book.)

Atul Gurtu started his research career in 1966 after completing M.Sc. in Physics from Panjab University, Chandigarh. He was awarded his Ph.D. in 1971 and has been in the Tata Inst of Fundamental Research, Mumbai, since 1969. He has been involved in experimental particle physics research, a field that attempts to delve into the nature of the fundamental constituents of matter and the forces between them. His group at the Tata Inst has been part of large experimental collaborations based at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, at Geneva, Switzerland. CERN is now the largest particle physics facility in the world and hosts the new atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which has come on-line recently and is beginning to produce interesting and intriguing results. Prof Gurtu is currently Senior Professor at the Tata Inst and leads a team of six Indian institutions collaborating in one of the front ranking experiments at the LHC, the CMS experiment. He was nominated by CERN to be author of the LBNL based Particle Data Group collaboration in 1992 and has been responsible for the sections on W and Z particles since that time. He is member of the Indian Academy of Sciences since 1996.

Greg Howe is in his third year as Director of Distance Learning for the Cleveland Institute of Music. Annually, the department delivers a robust program of interactive classes for kindergarten through high school students across North America while expanding the uses of video conference and Internet technologies into the music conservatory. Performances, like the one at the workshop, augment a busy schedule of teaching students at remote locations, seminars, master classes and exchanges with other conservatories around the world. Greg is delighted to add New Delhi into CIM’s group of collaborators and looks forward to many more joint projects with our good friends in India.

Ana [Preston] Hunsinger, Executive Director of Member Relations and Communications at Internet2, has senior management responsibilities for membership relations, international partnerships, programs, meetings, and communications. Ana and her staff work closely with Internet2 staff in other areas to support programmatic goals and recurring proactive interaction with the Internet2 member community. Previously Ana served as Director of Regional and State Network Relations, she managed FiberCo, and also helped manage Internet2''s international program and relationships. She has been active in the Internet2 community since 1998 and prior to joining Internet2, Ana worked at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, also an Internet2 member. Ana resides in Denver, Colorado. She has a BS in Computer Science and BAs in both Film Studies and Philosophy as well as a Master Degree in Philosophy, all from the University of Kansas.

Dr U.C. Jaleel is a Lecturer in Chemoinformatics at the Malabar Christian College. He is currently working on the topic related with development of quantum chemical descriptors for QSAR analysis. He is also working in collaboration on a project for parameterization of computational tools of organo mettalic compounds. He leads the extremely successful cheminformatics connect-to-decode programme on OSDD

Professor Ajit Kembhavi is the Director and Distinguished Professor at the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA) in Pune. He is one of the founding members of IUCAA. Before IUCAA he was at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai where he obtained his Ph.D. with Professor J.V. Narlikar and was then appointed as a scientist. Kembhavi has also been a post-doctoral fellow at the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge, England. Professor Kembhavi’s interests are in galaxies, high energy astrophysics, quasars, etc. and he leads the Virtual Observatory-India Project. He is deeply involved in developing astronomical research in universities and colleges in India. He is Chairman of various UGC committees which look after the UGC-Infonet which brings the benefits of information and communication technology to all the universities in India. He is a Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences and Indian Academy of Sciences and has received the UGC Hari Om award. Professor Kembhavi has published around 100 research papers in highly reputed international journals. He has guided a number of research students and works closely in collaboration with scientists from India and abroad. He travels widely all over the world for his research and for giving lectures. Professor Kembhavi is well known for his contribution to science popularization programmes and lectures extensively to the public in English, Marathi and Hindi. He has written and edited several books, most of which have been published internationally.

George A. Komatsoulis, Ph.D. is Deputy Director of the Center for Biomedical Informatics and Information Technology and acting Chief Information Officer at the National Cancer Institute (NCI), NIH. As such he has broad management responsibilities for the cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid (caBIG®) program. Dr. Komatsoulis has a Ph.D. in Molecular Biology and Biochemistry from the California Institute of Technology, and did post-doctoral work in the Department of Biochemistry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the Department of Mathematics at the University of Southern California. Prior to arriving at the NCI, Dr. Komatsoulis was a Senior Bioinformatics Scientist at Human Genome Sciences, Inc. in Rockville, MD.

Max Kuhn has over 15 years of experience in the biopharmaceutical industry. He is currently a Director in Nonclinical Statistics with Pfizer Global Research and Development. Max works in early discovery, with a concentration in computational chemistry and biology. Prior to joining Pfizer, Max worked in the diagnostic industry focusing on infectious disease diagnostics using growth-based and molecular instrumentation, with a focus on algorithms. He holds degrees in Mathematics and Biostatistics and received his Ph.D. in Biostatistics from the Medical College of Virginia at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Marjorie Lueck, Ph.D.

Program Director South Asia
Office of International Science & Engineering
National Science Foundation
4201 Wilson Boulevard, Stafford II - 1155.59
Arlington, VA 22230
Tel: 703 292-7229 or 8710
mlueck@nsf.gov
http://www/nsf.gov/oisermany

Andrew Lynn completed his Ph.D in Molecular Biophysics, and worked in the area of Malaria Research, before returning to Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University where he is currently Director of Communications and Information Services, and leads his group in the area of Computational Biology. His recent research is in the use of profile Hidden Markov Models and information theoretic measures in function determination. His interests are in Open Source Software and Cyberinfrastructure, where he leads national programs. He is part of the core committee of the Open Source Drug Discovery Program.

Ravi K Madduri is a Project Manager in the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at Argonne National Laboratory and a research fellow at the Computation Institute at the University of Chicago. Ravi is one of three key contributors to the National Institutes of Health $100M Cancer Bio-Informatics Grid (caBIG), which links 60 NIH-funded cancer centers and clinical sites engaged in cancer research. For his efforts in project management, tool development, and collaboration, Ravi received several Outstanding Achievement Awards from NIH in recognition of his work on caBIG project management, tool development, and collaboration. Ravi is a lead architect on the scientific workflow design and implementation project under the caGrid toolkit. Ravi is one of the lead developers on the Globus Toolkit. Ravi finished his Masters in Computer Science from Illinois Institute of Technology in 2002 and has been working at Argonne National Laboratory since Aug 2001.

Dr. Ashish Mahabal is a Senior Research Scientist at the Astronomy Department of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). He got his PhD at IUCAA, Pune in 1998, and after a one-year postdoc at PRL, Ahemdabad, moved to Caltech. He has participated in several large area sky surveys. His main area of expertise is data-mining for and classification of transient astronomical sources in sky surveys. He actively collaborates with astronomers on several continents for follow-up observations. He is one of the initial members of the US National Virtual Observatory (NVO) and continues to be involved in the data-mining aspects of the Virtual Astronomy Observatory (VAO) into which NVO has evolved.

Dr Shekhar Mande is working as Scientist at Centre for DNA Fingerprinting and Diagnostics, Hyderabad. He undertook his Ph.D in Molecular Biophysics at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore and his post doctoral study at Rijksuniversiteit Groningen in the Netherlands. He has published a number of papers in Bio-physics and Computational Biology. He was the recipient of the prestigious Dr Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Biological Science in 2005 and has been elected as a fellow in all the three major Science Academics in India

Dr Ujjwal Maulik did his Masters and Ph.D in Computer Science in 1991 and 1997 respectively. He is currently a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Technology, Jadavpur University. He has served as the Head of the Computer Science and Technology Department of Kalyani Government Engineering College during 1996-1999. Dr. Maulik has worked in Center for Adaptive Systems Application and Los Alamos National Laboratories, Los Alamos, New Mexico, USA, in 1997, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia in 1999, University of Texas at Arlington, USA in 2001, University of Maryland at Baltimore county, USA in 2004, AIS laboratory in Fraunhofer Institute, in 2005, Tingsua University, Chaina in 2007, University of Rome, Italy in 2008, German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) and University of Heidelberg in 2009. He has received postdoctoral BOYSCAST fellowship from the Dept. of Science and Technology, Govt. of India in 2001. Dr. Maulik is a Fellow of Institution of Electronics and Telecommunication Engineers (IETE), India as well as Institute of Engineers (IE), India and a senior member of Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), USA. He has co-authored/edited several books and around 150 technical articles in international journals, book chapters and conference/workshop proceedings. He has served on the program committees of several International Conferences, and has delivered many invited talks and tutorials around the world. His research interests include, Soft Computing, Pattern Recognition, Data Mining, Bioinformatics and Parallel and Distributed Systems.

George McLaughlin, the former head of the Australian Academic and Research Network, has spent the last few years working with various international agencies and initiatives that had a focus on exploiting Research and Education Networks to enhance collaborative opportunities in research and discovery and to improve societal outcomes, particularly in the South Asia region. These included roles as senior technical consultant to the World Bank’s SERENE program; coordinator of the South Asian Extension Network for the European Commission’s Trans-Eurasian Information Network (TEIN), and as Applications Advocate for the TranPac program. McLaughlin is also one of the Directors of the Asia Pacific Advanced Network (APAN) and has presented extensively at international conferences and workshops. He has received a number of awards for his contributions to the ICT and Research and Education sectors and in 2009 was inducted as a Member of the Order of Australia.

Michael McLennan is a Senior Research Scientist in the Rosen Center for Advanced Computing at Purdue University. He is the software architect for nanoHUB.org and creator of HUBzero’s Rappture toolkit. Dr. McLennan has a long history of developing CAD software at companies including Bell Labs and Cadence Design Systems. He received his Ph.D. in 1990 from Purdue for the study of quantum mechanical electron transport in mesoscopic devices, supported as an SRC Graduate Fellow. He is also well known in the open source community for creating [incr Tcl], an object-oriented extension of the popular Tcl scripting language. He is a coauthor of two books: "Effective Tcl/Tk Programming" and "Tcl/Tk Tools."

Dr Sanjay Mehandale is Deputy Director at National AIDS Research Institute(NARI) alaboratory under Indian Council of Medical Research. Dr Mehandale gained his MBBS from Pune University India. He has an M.D in Preventive and Social Medicine from University of Pune. He holds a Master of Public Health from Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, USA. His area of research interest include: AIDS vaccine triasl and assessing community preparedness; Clinical trials involving Vaginal microbicides, HIV prevention in couples; Epidemiology of HIV in various sub-populations and disease burden estimation. Dr Mehandale was a lecturer in B.J.Medical College, Pune. He also taught at Pune University. Dr Mehandale has published Published 107 papers in National and International journals. He is a member of various National and International committees, these include: membership of the Ethical Committee, National Institute of Virology, Pune; Project Advisory Committee, KEM Hospital and Research Center, Pune; Executive Council of Maharashtra Chapter of Indian Public Health Association; Technical Resource Group on Counseling of the National AIDS Control Organization; Indo-US Joint Working Group on Maternal and Child Health; the Indo-French [ICMR-INSERM] Joint Working Group; Executive Committee of HIV Prevention Trial Network (HPTN). He also chairs the Ethical Committee, DY Patil Medical College for Girls, Pimpri, Pune.

Ishwar Murthy is a Professor in the area of Quantitative Methods and Information Systems. His research interests are in Discrete and Stochastic Optimization, and their applications in telecommunications and routing problems. He has numerous publications in leading journals such as Management Science, Operations Research, Naval Research Logistics, Networks and INFORMS Journal on Computing. He holds a B. Tech in Mechanical Engineering from IIT Kanpur and a M.B.A. from NorthEast Louisiana University. He obtained his PhD in Business Analysis from Texas A&M University. Prior to joining IIM Bangalore, he was a tenured faculty member at Louisiana State University. He has also served as a visiting faculty at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, the Krannert Graduate School of Management at Purdue University, Chinese University of Hong Kong and Georgia Tech. University.

Dr. Radha Nandkumar is a well-recognized leader in high performance computing (HPC). She has been at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) since its inception. She is currently the Director of International and Campus Relations and is also a Senior Research Scientist at NCSA. She has initiated and fostered collaborations with sister institutions around the globe; these span more than eighteen countries from multiple continents and she serves on the advisory boards of multiple academic HPC institutions around the world. She is actively involved in several technical program committees, organization and chairing of international and national workshops and conferences on supercomputing, middleware and grid computing, women in computing and diversity in computing. Her research interests include HPC, grid computing, and their impact on society at large. Her unique capabilities that bridge science, technology and management have resulted in creating strategic inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary collaborations across the world. One such initiative is a multi-institutional collaboration for child health informatics for monitoring children’s health and fitness around the world. She holds a Ph.D. in Physics from UIUC. She also has earned an Executive MBA, also from the University of Illinois.

Mr. Jothi Padmanabhan is a Senior Principal Engineer at Yahoo!’s Cloud Computing division. He currently leads a team in Yahoo! Bangalore that develops a large-scale key-value database called Sherpa. In his past role as a Hadoop engineer, he has contributed code to the Hadoop Map-Reduce framework. Jothi has a Masters degree in CS from Mississippi State University and a Bachelors degree from IIT Madras. He comes with a strong High Performance Computing background and has developed MPI Message Passing Libraries for several types of high-speed networks. Off work, he is a health enthusiast and a marathon runner.

Dr. Mathew Palakal [School of Informatics/Department of Computer & Information Science Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, Indiana, USA] is working on research associated biomedical literature mining. As data and information space continue to grow exponentially, the need for rapidly surveying the published literature, synthesizing, and discovering the embedded "knowledge" is becoming critical to allow the researchers to conduct "informed" work, avoid repetition, and generate new hypotheses. Knowledge, in this case, is defined as one-to-many and many-to-many relationships among biological entities such as gene, protein, drug, disease, etc. Dr. Palakal’s group has developed a literature mining system called BioMAP ( http://regen.cs.iupui.edu/research/ ). The BioMAP system can carry out large-scale biomedical literature mining that could enhance the ability of biomedical researchers to formulate methods for the analysis of biological data such as identifying biological pathways and provide support for disease target and new biomarker discovery. Currently, large-scale literature mining on documents related to colon rectal cancer, breast cancer, and limb regeneration are being carried out, by augmenting the experimental data, to find novel pathways and biomarkers for the respective diseases.

Dr. Sudhakar Pamidighantam has been a consulting and research scientist for high performance computing and applications at NCSA for the last 14 years. He received his Ph. D. from University of Alabama at Birmingham after spending couple of preparatory years at IISc Bangalore, after Graduating with an M.Sc. from University of Hyderabad, India. Dr. Pamidighantam provides scientific consulting services for chemistry and computational biology communities at NCSA/TeraGrid and deployed Chemviz (chemviz.ncsa.uiuc.edu) the chemistry educational portal with integration of NCSA Condor resources. He has developed integrated quantum chemistry remote job monitoring technologies deployed at PACI partner systems in 1998 which evolved into GridChem cyber infrastructure ( www.gridchem.org ) and continues to serve high performance computational chemistry and molecular modeling research and education communities. Currently he is leading the middleware integration for ParamChem virtual organization ( www.paramchem.org ) and continues to extend the services in Gridchem supported by US National Science Foundation. His interests are in multiscale molecular and materials modeling and simulation and cyberinfrastructure for science and engineering.

Dr. A. Paventhan is currently Sr. Manager (R&D) at ERNET India, Bangalore centre handling research projects on Mobile IPv6 and 6LoWPAN. He received his M.Tech from IIT, Delhi and PhD from University of Southampton, UK. He was part of the Microsoft HPC institute at Southampton and post-PhD, he has contributed to the EGEE Grid middleware projects at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Oxford, UK. He started his career at National Informatics Centre (NIC) in the field of Geographical Information Systems and later he worked as a team-coordinator of Operating Systems Group at C-DAC developing light-weight communication substrate for PARAM HPC clusters. His area of interest include Computer Networks, Parallel and Distributed computing.

Jean Peccoud is an expert in computational synthetic biology. His current scientific interests include the development of linguistic models of DNA sequences, the optimization of DNA fabrication processes, and the development of new instruments to measure the dynamics of gene networks in live cells. Dr Peccoud’s group is leading the development of GenoCAD, an open source web-based application to design synthetic DNA molecules from libraries of standard genetic parts. In the 1990s, Dr Peccoud pioneered the development of stochastic models of genetic networks. Dr Peccoud joined the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute at Virginia Tech in 2006 as Associate Professor. Prior to joining VBI, he was responsible for a research program at Du Pont focused on gene and regulatory network discovery, the design of DNA transformation vectors, and the development of methods to analyze the genetic properties of gene networks. Dr Peccoud has been a visiting professor in the department of electrical engineering at the University of Washington, a visiting scholar with Wolfram Research, and the recipient of a NATO Fellowship. He serves as Academic Editor of PLoS ONE.

Dr. Ninan Sajeeth Philip is on sabbatical at the Inter University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA), Pune from St. Thomas College in Kozhencheri (Mahatma Gandhi University,Kottayam), Kerala where he is Reader and Research Guide in Physics. His area of research is in Machine Learning (ML) and he mainly focus on the design and development of ML tools for data mining applications. He is currently involved in developing ML tools for Virtual Observatory (VO-India) and some of the existing and up coming sky surveys that will be extensively using similar tools for data collection and classification. He is the author of several application packages and the Slax-Atma Linux distribution that allows users to boot and work on most astronomy packages from any PC without actually installing the software on them.

Dr. Gulshan Rai has over 25 years of experience in various areas of Information Technology including: Cyber Security, e-Governance, Legal Framework and the Information Technology Act for e-commerce. At present, he is Director General, CERT-In (Indian Computer Emergency Response Team) and Group Coordinator of e-Security and Cyber Law Division in the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology. Prior to this he was Executive Director, ERNET India for over 7 years and was instrumental in setting up of the first large scale education and research network in close collaboration with leading educational and research institutions in the country. Dr. Rai has been working since 1998 in the area of evolving legal framework to address issues arising out of cyberspace. His sustained efforts in the area have resulted in second Technology Legislation in the History of India i.e. Information Technology Act and recent amendments in the Act. Dr. Rai is particularly focused on developing security capabilities in the country through increased security education programs. He has initiated several programs in this area with industry and educational institutions. He has enhanced the security of government infrastructure through an effective security framework that prescribes standards, and audits by a panel of independent auditors. Dr. Rai holds a doctoral degree and M.Tech., and has published several papers and reports on e-commerce, cyber security, cyber laws, education and networking and has presented the same at national and international conferences.

Mr. N. Mohan Ram has over 23 years of development experience in ICT. His research interests include computer architectures, operating systems, cluster and grid computing. He is presently the Director General of ERNET India. ERNET India has the largest nationwide terrestrial and satellite network dedicated for the usage of the research and education community across the country. Focus of ERNET India is not limited to just providing connectivity, but to meet the entire needs of its users by hosting and providing relevant information. Research & Development and Training in networking are integral parts of ERNET India’s activities. ERNET India has setup a pan-Indian network connecting over 1200 institutions across the country with 15 Points of Presence (PoPs) at premier academic and research institutions. ERNET was the first to bring Internet into India. Since then, it has been providing Internet and Intranet connections to institutions in various sectors, namely, agriculture, health, higher education, schools and science & technology. Earlier, Mohan Ram was the Director of the C-DAC Bangalore Centre and also the Chief Technology Officer for C-DAC. He has been instrumental in building C-DAC Bangalore as a resource Centre in High Performance Computing (HPC), as a Centre of Excellence in Software and as an ISO 9001:2000 certified centre. The centre has been awarded the 6th IETE Corporate Award for Performance Excellence in Software (2004). Mr. Mohan Ram holds M.Tech in Computer Science from Indian Institute of Technology(IIT), Chennai. He has had an excellent academic record being the topper in Post Graduation in IIT, Chennai; gold medal winner for all the years in graduation and state rank holder in school exams. He has also been awarded the IIT and National Merit Scholarships. He has authored several technical reports and has publications in National/International Conferences. He has received the C-DAC PARAM award of excellence on several occasions.

Dr. S. Ramachandran has a background in both computational biology and parasitology, and is interested in developing computational methods for predicting virulence factors where the challenge is to develop good prediction algorithms with small datasets. He is also interested in developing large datasets in the highly portable platform R for systems biology investigations. Very recently he has started computational work using Chemoinformatics and Biochemoinformatics.He also focuses on experimental investigations in the signalling of nitrogen metabolism and potential adhesins and their host receptors in M. tuberculosis. He is also actively involved in the Open Source Drug Discovery Project. He had earlier completed his Ph.D from Jawaharlal Nehru University, and worked at NIH before returning to Delhi's Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology, where he currently works.

Srinivasan Ramakrishnan completed his six year term as first Director General of Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) last year during which the institution expanded from four labs to ten labs, simultaneously widening the scope of it’s work from building Supercomputers and it’s scientific applications to initiating Grid computing ( ‘Garuda’), High Speed networking related development, Security, Software Technology – specifically Open Source and Middleware for eGovernance applications, Indian Language computing – including speech, electronics for industrial and strategic sectors, medical informatics and Advanced and specialized training programs for the burgeoning IT industry in the form of finishing school. In the process, the institution metamorphosed into a ten lab national institution contributing R&D to national initiatives and the new technology markets. Earlier, during over twenty five years of his innings with Department of IT, Ministry of Communications and IT, Government of India Ramakrishnan played a pioneering role in India’s efforts in Computer networks as Project Director - during ’86 and ’98, initiating Indian NREN entitled ERNET as a collaborative effort of 5 IITs, IISc, NCST and DOE. The project, initially funded by UNDP and Government of IT enabled a large body of computer networking researchers and engineers to blossom from all levels – B.Tech to Ph.d and helped diffuse the expertise to industry as well. With many firsts to it’s credit, it grew from 8 institutions to 700 institutions with 700,000 users by ’91 much ahead of commercial Internet service, connecting to global internet by ’89. Later, Ramakrishnan played a key role in putting together a 622 Mbps Indo-US link during CERN High energy conference in Mumbai in June 2006 and demonstration of applications by U.S and Indian researchers and academia. At the same event, C-DAC became an International member of Internet 2. He was a member of NKC working Group which recommended setting up of NKN. Later, he was a member of DIT working Group to prepare detailed blue-print. After the inauguration of NKN by Hon. President, he is a consultant to NKN and a member of NKN committee on Model projects – somewhat akin to Application strategic council of Internet 2. At C-DAC, he enabled migration of underlying infrastructure of GARUDA to NKN and also brought applications, as in the case of Disaster Management and Collaborative learning, besides others. Currently, he is Advisor, Media Lab Asia working on Health Informatics and is Consultant to NKN and a few other programs and agencies. He is a B.Tech and M.Tech from Indian Institute of Madras. In the course of a number of assignments and the range topics he has covered over more than three decades at Department of IT and a number of other Institutions he has headed ( NCST, Mumbai and Media Lab Asia and C-DAC ) he has received a number of honors, awards and recognition from a number of agencies and associations. He has travelled extensively and has been Chairman or member of Bilateral delegations. He is a member of IEEE and Internet Society and was Vice President and Governor of ICCC.

Dr. V. Ramgopal Rao is a Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and the Chief investigator for the Centre of Excellence in Nanoelectronics project at IIT Bombay. Dr. Rao has over 250 publications in the area of Electron Devices and Nanoelectronics in refereed international journals and conference proceedings and holds thirteen patents (including 10 US patents), either issued or pending. Prof. Rao received the coveted Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize in Engineering Sciences awarded by the Hon'ble Prime Minister, Govt of India in 2005 for his work on Electron Devices. He is also a recipient of the 2004 Swarnajayanti Fellowship award from DST (which is instituted to mark 50 years of India’s independence), 2007 IBM Faculty award, the 2008 MRSI-ICSC Annual Prize, 2009 TechnoMentor award from the Indian Semiconductor Association and the 2010 DAE-SRC Outstanding Research Investigator award. He is an Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices in the CMOS Devices and Technology area and serves on the Editorial boards of various other international journals. Dr. Rao is a Fellow of the Indian National Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences. He is a Distinguished Lecturer, IEEE Electron Devices Society and interacts closely with many semiconductor industries including Intel, IBM, Infineon, Maxim and Texas Instruments. He has served on the program/organizing committees of a large number of international conferences in the area of electron devices and was Chairman, IEEE AP/ED Bombay Chapter during 2002-2003. He currently serves on the executive committee of the IEEE Bombay Section besides being the vice-chair, IEEE Asia-Pacific Regions/Chapters Subcommittee. For more information about Prof. Rao’s current research activities and a list of publications, please visit http://www.ee.iitb.ac.in/~rrao . E-mail: rrao@ee.iitb.ac.in .

Hemant Shah trained and worked as an Obstetrician and Gynecologist in India, his main interests being high risk pregnancies and operative gynecology. While working as an OBGYN physician, he co-founded and was the Executive Director (Technology) of a medical informatics company in India. He led the development of several web-based applications for physicians in this role. He also developed an advanced Prenatal Information System to help obstetricians better manage their patients. He is the author of the Proteus model ( http://www.proteme.org ) for automated clinical decision support guidelines. Proteus (PROcesses and Transactions Editable by USers) is a model that allows creation of clinical guidelines with modular knowledge components. Each knowledge component represents a clinically identifiable activity and is available to the clinician as executable knowledge. He is leading an open source project to develop software tools based on Proteus. From 2000 till 2002, he was at National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, Maryland, as a Medical Informatics Research Fellow. After which, he served as Information Scientist at City of Hope National Medical Center (COH), for more than four years. Since three years, he has been working at Henry Ford Health System (HFHS) as Senior Research Informatician, where he is leading the effort to integrate the Proteus based decision support system into the HFHS's EHR system, within the Semantic Data Capture Initiative project. His special interests in informatics are technologies and tools that directly impact clinician’s performance, particularly Clinical Decision Support Systems and Clinical Information Systems as well as semantic interoperability for clinical systems. He specializes in metadata and ontologies, and has led the Metadata project for the caBIG at COH as well as contributed to the vocabulary and metadata needs of several projects.

Shamjith K V has been working with CDAC for last 6 years. He is currently holding the position of Project Leader in the Service Oriented Architecture team at Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), Bangalore. His areas of research include Grid Computing, Parallel computing, Debugging and Profiling. He has involved in design, deployment & operations of the Garuda Grid, the National grid computing initiative of India. He is also involved in the grid interoperability projects with attempts to link the European grid with the Indian Garuda grid.

Ganesh Shankar is the caBIG Deployment Lead for the Indiana University Simon Cancer Center (IUSCC) and has served in this capacity for the past three years. In this role, he was responsible for assessing bioinformatics needs at the IUSCC and deploying appropriate caBIG applications to meet those needs. As Deployment Lead, he has contributed to improving caBIG applications at the national level as the caArray Subgroup Lead. For these efforts, he was accorded the caBIG 2010 Developing Solutions Award. In addition, Mr. Shankar is the Manager for the Advanced IT Core at the Indiana University Pervasive Technology Institute, and provides access to high performance storage, applications, and computing infrastructure to the IU School of Medicine. He is also the Manager of the Biomedical Applications Group which constructs and deploys customized applications to support biomedical research. He received his first Masters in Biological Sciences from Carnegie Mellon University and his second Masters in Bioinformatics from the State University of New York, Buffalo. Before joining IU, Mr. Shankar worked as a Bioinformatics Developer and Project Lead at Roswell Park Cancer Institute.

Dipak Singh is Director in ERNET and he heads network operations. He is M.Sc(Tech) in Applied Physics from Calcutta University and had overall 24 years of experience in IT related activity. He had played great role in expansion of ERNET. His major contribution in ERNET has been upgradation of ERNET Backbone, Upgradation of network infrastructure, Deployment of MPLS in ERNET backbone , Internal & external routing, International routing with GEANT & TEIN3, Deployment of IPv6 testbed in ERNET, High-speed communication fabric for Indian grid GARUDA etc . Mr Dipak Singh represented ERNET India in number of European Commission funded projects.

Ashok Soni, Professor and Chairperson of Operations and Decision Technologies Ashok Soni is Professor and Chairperson of Operations and Decision Technologies at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business. He received his education first in the United Kingdom with a B.Sc. in Aeronautical Engineering from Manchester University and an M. Sc. in Operations Research from Strathclyde University. Later, he completed an MBA and a DBA in Operations Management and Quantitative Business Analysis at Indiana University. Prior to graduate work at Indiana University, he was a management consultant in the United Kingdom for four years. His primary teaching interests are in supply chain management and the application of information technology to supply chain planning and management, and he has earned more than 20 teaching awards. His current research interests are in enterprise systems, emerging technologies and decision support systems. His published work has appeared in such journals as Management Science, Naval Logistics Research, IIE Transactions, the European Journal of Operational Research, Production and Inventory Management, and Computers and Mathematical Modeling.

Dr. Sarita Soni is a Professor of Optometry, Associate Vice President for Research at Indiana University and Vice Provost for Research at Indiana University-Bloomington. As Vice Provost for Research at the IU Bloomington campus Dr. Soni is responsible for coordinating and developing research across disciplines and schools at IU Bloomington and is responsible for twenty campus research centers and institutes. She oversees all of the internal research funding and all grant programs that are administered by the Office of the Vice Provost for Research. Dr. Soni received her Ophthalmic Optics degree from University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology in Manchester, England and her OD degree and MS degree in Pathology from Indiana University. In 1995 she helped establish the Borish Center for Ophthalmic Research for patient based research at Indiana University and served as it’s co-director until 2006. Dr. Soni’s research focuses on cornea and contact lenses and correction of refractive errors. Professor Soni is a diplomate of the Cornea and Contact Lens Section of the American Academy of Optometry and an elected fellow of the National Academies of Practice. She has served as the Indiana University School of Optometry as an Interim Dean, as a voting member on the FDA's Ophthalmic Devices panel, as a member of the NIH National Advisory Eye Council and on the Research Council of the American Optometric Association. She has served as a member of the Board of Directors of the American Academy of Optometry and is a past president of the American Optometric Foundation.

John Speakman serves as Chief Program Officer of the Center for Biomedical Informatics and Information Technology (CBIIT) at the National Cancer Institute (NCI), within the United States Federal Government. John leads CBIIT’s programs, including the cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid (caBIG®) program, supporting molecular science, biobanking, in vivo imaging, clinical trials, population sciences and healthcare. John joined NCI in September 2006 to lead its clinical products and programs, and was appointed to the post of Chief Program Officer in October 2010. Prior to serving at NCI John worked at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) in New York City, U.S.A., where he served as one of the three founding members of a team responsible for the collaborative design and development of MSKCC’s pioneering clinical research informatics system. John joined MSKCC from St. Thomas’s Hospital Medical School, then part of the United Medical and Dental Schools, part of London University, in the United Kingdom. John’s personal focus area is the application of informatics architectures to the reengineering of the biomedical research process and to the improvement of clinical outcomes, especially through exploring the connection of clinical and biological data.

Anil Srivastava is the International Outreach Coordinator for caBIG® (cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid) at the Center for Biomedical Informatics and Information Technology of the US National Cancer Institute (NCI CBIIT). He also leads the Open Health Systems Laboratory (OHSL) co-located at Johns Hopkins University Montgomery County Campus. His prior assignments include chief knowledge officer of a major medical informatics software and service company, CTIS; senior advisor to The World Bank and several UN specialized agencies; founding chief executive of NASSCOM—India's National Association of Software and Service Companies (1989-91); visting scholar, Calornia State University Long Beach; Apple's Advanced Technology Group; advisor to the government of India on transfer of broadcasting technology; and director and head of knowledge engineering with Centre for Development of Instructional Technology (Cendit). Much of his work has been at the intersection of emerging technology, societal application and international cooperation. One of his areas of special interest has been research and education networks. As advisor to Sam Pitroda he has played an active role in formulation of recommendations on National Knowledge Network (NKN) and National Health Information Network (NHIN) of the National Knowledge Commission.

Ruth M. Stone is Associate Vice Provost for Research and Laura Boulton Professor of Folklore and Ethnomusicology and African Studies. She has edited Africa (1998) and The Handbook of African Music (2000) in the Garland Encyclopedia of World Music series. She has also authored Music in West Africa (2004), Dried Millet Breaking (1988), and Let the Inside be Sweet (1982) based on fieldwork conducted among the Kpelle of Liberia, West Africa. Her book, Theory in Ethnomusicology (Prentice-Hall, 2008) has also appeared in Chinese translation (2010).. Ruth Stone also works on multimedia projects. Her first was a co-authored project entitled, Five Windows on Africa (2000, Indiana University Press). More recently she has been co-project director for the EVIA Digital Archive, an electronic publication that will be accessible over Internet2.

Dr V Sundarajan is at the Scientific and Engineering Computing Group Centre for Development of Advanced computing,Pune. His research focuses on Protein Structure Optimization an Polymerisation, Nano and Meso- Scale Simulations and High Performance Computing. He has been a member of technical staff at C-DAC,Pune,India since 1994.

Dr. Subra Suresh, Director National Science Foundation Subra Suresh was sworn in as the 13th director of the National Science Foundation (NSF) on October 18, 2010. Previously, Suresh, 54, served as dean of the engineering school and as Vannevar Bush Professor of Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). A mechanical engineer who later became interested in materials science and biology, Suresh has done pioneering work studying the biomechanics of blood cells under the influence of diseases such as malaria. From 2000 to 2006, Suresh served as the head of the MIT Department of Materials Science and Engineering. He joined MIT in 1993 as the R.P. Simmons Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and held joint faculty appointments in the Departments of Mechanical Engineering and Biological Engineering, as well as the Division of Health Sciences and Technology. Suresh holds a bachelor's degree from the Indian Institute of Technology in Madras, a master's degree from Iowa State University, and earned his doctorate from MIT in 1981. Suresh was nominated by President Obama to become the new NSF director on June 8. He replaces Arden L. Bement, Jr., who led the agency from 2004 until he resigned in May of this year.

Kevin Thompson serves as a Program Director at the U.S. National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Office of Cyberinfrastructure (OCI). He is responsible for NSF’s International Research Network Connections (IRNC) program, and the Software Development for Cyberinfrastructure (SDCI) program. He started at NSF in January 2003, and from 2009-2010 worked at the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) as a Program Director of the DHS Cyber Security Research and Development program. Prior to NSF, Mr. Thompson was Senior Manager in MCI's Advanced Internet Technologies department, responsible for engineering and operation of the vBNS, a national research and education network.

Dr. L. Srinivasa Varadharajan, is Associate Professor in the Srimathi Sundari Subramanian Department of Visual Psychophysics at the Elite School of Optometry, Medical Research Foundation, in Chennai, India. He holds a Master’s of Science degree and a Ph. D. in physics from the University of Missouri in Rolla1, U.S.A. He also holds a Master’s degree in physics from the Indian Institute of Technology in Madras and a bachelor’s degree in physics from the University of Madras. At the Elite School of Optometry, DR Varadharajan is a two-time winner of S. Srinivasan Memorial Award for the Best Junior Faculty. Dr. Varadharajan’s primary research interests are in computational neuroscience, adaptive optics, the effects of aging on visual functions, and the development of novel, cost-effective vision testing and enhancement devices. In particular, he focuses on modeling cortical interactions in the human visual system as well as modeling changes in colour vision and other visual parameters in people with cataracts, age-related macular degeneration, diabetes, etc., and measuring and correcting higher order aberrations in human eyes. Dr. Varadharajan has published extensively in international journals including Ophthalmic and Physiological Optics, Vision Research, Optometry and Vision Science, and the Journal of Modern Optics. He is also a founding member and optics coordinator for the Common Minimum Optometry Curriculum for India, a group of interested individuals who have come together to standardize the curriculum for the profession of optometry in India, and was also the Scientific Committee Head for the Elite School of Optometry’s International Vision science and Optometry Conference held in Chennai this past summer. Among other projects, Dr. Varadharajan has been involved in Essilor, the ESO Project on Literature Survey on Indian Eyes, which is a comprehensive literature survey on various ocular and visual parameters as measured on the people of India. He also designed, developed, and validated the ESO Pocket Vision Screener, a very compact vision screening chart using Sloan letters, and the Tamil logMAR Chart, a vision chart constructed using Tamil alphabets that is currently used in rural vision camps.

Prof Pramod P. Wangikar received his Bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from UDCT and a PhD in Chemical and Biochemical Engineering from the University of Iowa, USA. Subsequently, after working in a biotechnology company in the US, he joined IIT Bombay in 1997 in the Department of Chemical Engineering. His research interests are in the area of structural bioinformatics and metabolic modeling. He has published over 35 research papers in international journals, which together have received over 500 citations. He is the recipient of several awards including the 2006 National Bioscience Award for Career Development, INAE Young engineer award and DAE Young Scientist Award. He is on the editorial board of Biotechnology and Bioegineering.

Dr. Rajeev Wankar is working as a Reader (Associate Professor) in the Department of Computer and Information Sciences at University of Hyderabad. He earned Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Department of Computer Science, Devi Ahilya University Indore. In 1998, the German Academic Exchange Service awarded him “Sandwich Model” fellowship. He was working in the Institut für Informatik, Freie Universität, Berlin and had collaboration with Scientists of Konrad Zuse Institut für Informationstechnik (ZIB), a Supercomputing Laboratory in Berlin, for almost two years. Currently he is working (research/teaching) in the area of Parallel Computing, Distributed Shared Memory Computing, Grid Computing and Multi Core Computing. He is actively participating in an International Geo-Grid activity known as GEON with San Diego Supercomputing Centre, University of California, San Diego from Indian side and an Associate Faculty in the University Centre of Earth and Space Sciences (UoH). He served as a program committee member in many conferences such as HiPC-07, TEAA, ICDCIT, TENCON etc. He served as the Guest Editor of IJCSA’s Special issue on Grid and Parallel Systems.

Bradley C. Wheeler, Ph.D. [Vice President for Information Technology & CIO, Dean, and Professor Indiana University] has been a national and international leader in developing multi-institutional efforts in collaboration. He co-founded some of higher education’s most transformative software and service collaborations including the Sakai Project ( http://sakaiproject.org ) for teaching and learning software, Kuali ( http://kuali.org ) for financial and other administrative systems, and the HathiTrust ( http://www.hathitrust.org ) for digital copies of scanned books as part of the Google Book Project. He is a professor of information systems in IU’s Kelley School of Business, and has taught executive programs for corporate and MBA audiences on six continents. At IU, he leads the IT services for research, educational and administrative computing, and IU’s Global Research Network Operations Center (GRNOC) ( http://globalnoc.iu.edu ).

James G. Williams is the Director of International Networking at Indiana University. He is also co-chair of the GENI Operations and Integration Working Group. He has been the PI for several NSF network infrastructure projects, most recently the TransPAC3 (TP3) and America Connects to Europe (ACE). His research interests include high-performance networking; distributed network operations; and development and deployment of networking in support of research and education in developing countries. Mr. Williams has an M.S. in Systems Science from Michigan State University and has been at Indiana University for over 25 years.

Last updated December 2, 2010