Ian Foster
Ian Foster is a computer scientist with a predilection for building software systems (and, more recently, for deploying services) that solve problems in the sciences. He likes to think that he is part of a movement that is re-inventing scholarship and education in an era of massive and pervasive computation–much as happened after the dawn of printing (1450) and the calculus (1687).
He is a Distinguished Fellow and Senior Scientist at Argonne National Laboratory and a Professor at the University of Chicago–two wonderful institutions where science and scholarship are cherished, and the importance of new forms of instrumentation as enablers of discovery is appreciated. He is also affiliated with the Department of Computer Science, Mathematics and Computer Science Division, and Institute for Molecular Engineering at the University and Argonne.
His research group, Globus Labs, engages talented students, postdocs, and staff in the challenge of making all research data accessible, discoverable, and usable. There they closely with Globus, which builds and operates cloud data services for the research community.