Prof. Dr. Rick Stevens

Since 1999 Rick Stevens has been a professor at the University of Chicago and since 2004 Associate Laboratory Director at Argonne National Laboratory. He is internationally known for work in high-performance computing, collaboration and visualization technology, and for building computational tools and web infrastructures to support large-scale genome and metagenome analysis for basic science and infectious disease research.  He teaches and supervises students in the areas of computer systems and computational biology.  He co-leads the DOE national laboratory group that has been developing the national initiative for Exascale computing.  
He is principle investigator for the NIH/NIAID supported PATRIC bioinformatics resource center which is developing comparative analysis tools for infectious disease research and serves a large user community.  He is also Co-PI for the DOE/SC supported Systems Biology Knowledgebase project (KBase) which is building a comprehensive computing environment for biological discovery in the energy and environmental biology areas.
Over the past twenty years he and his colleagues have developed the SEED, RAST, MG-RAST and ModelSEED genome analysis and bacterial modeling servers that have been used by 10’s of thousands of users to annotate and analyze more than 250,000 microbial genomes and metagenomic samples.  
At Argonne, Professor Stevens leads the Computing, Environment and Life Sciences directorate that operates one of the top five supercomputers in the world (a 10 Petaflops/s machine called MIRA).  Prior to that role he led the Mathematics and Computer Science Division for ten years and the Physical Sciences Directorate.  He and his group have won R+D100 awards for developing advanced collaboration technology (Access Grid).  He has published over 150 papers and book chapters and holds several patents.  He lectures widely on the opportunities for large-scale computing to impact biological science.
In the late 1990's he was the founding Director of the NSF Teragrid project which pioneered the concept of community science gateways built on distributed high-performance computing and data resources (the first large NSF Cyberinfrastructure project). He serves on many national and international advisory committees and still enjoys time writing code and occasionally playing with his 3D printer.