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Shekhar appointed AHPCRC director

September 2, 2005

Shashi ShekharIT dean Steven Crouch has announced the appointment of Distinguished McKnight University Professor Shashi Shekhar (computer science and engineering) as director of the Army High Performance Computing Research Center (AHPCRC), effective September 1. He succeeds Professor Vipin Kumar, who became head of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering July 1.

 

Shekhar is a world leader in the area of spatial databases, an interdisciplinary field at the intersection of computer science and geographic information science. A major goal of his research is to understand the computational structure of very large spatial databases needed by physical sciences and engineering disciplines. His expertise is widely sought after by policymakers in the U.S. and abroad, and his research is now playing a critical role in evacuation planning in the context of homeland security. His distinguished academic record includes two books and over 160 refereed papers.

Shekhar has had a long association with the AHPCRC, which conducts computational science research in areas of defense technology important to the army and the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD). The center also supports educational programs designed to encourage students to pursue careers in high performance computing.

Shekhar received a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of California-Berkeley in 1989. He is a fellow of the IEEE and a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the National Academy of Sciences/National Research Council Mapping Science Committee, and the ACM-GIS Workshop steering committee. He is coauthor of a popular textbook on spatial databases and co-editor-in-chief of the journal Geoinformatica. He also has served on the editorial board of IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering.