Bio: Sid Karin joined the UCSD faculty as an adjunct professor in 1986. He received his Ph.D. in nuclear engineering from the University of Michigan in 1973. Karin worked for General Atomics from 1973-85, ultimately as director of its Information Systems Division. He was the founding director of the San Diego Supercomputer Center from 1985-95, and then from 1997 to 2001. Karin is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a member of ACM and the IEEE Computer Society. He was a member of President Clinton's Information Technology Advisory Committee's (PITAC) Panel on Transforming the Practice of Healthcare in 2000, and sits on advisory boards at Telcordia Technologies and Applied Metacomputing. Karin has been awarded the Atomic Energy Commission Special Fellowship in Nuclear Science and Engineering, the National Defense Education Act Fellowship, and the New York State Regent College Scholarship. Karin is co-author, with Norris Parker Smith, of 'The Supercomputer Era' (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987).

Research: Recognized as a national expert on high performance computing and its application to advancing scientific research, Professor Karin is a frequent invited speaker, serves on numerous national review panels, and serves as an international advisor in this capacity. In the early 1980s, Karin was one of the leaders in the creation of the NSF's Supercomputer Centers program, and founded the San Diego Supercomputer Center in 1985. As SDSC's first director, he also founded the NSF's Partnerships for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (PACI) program--one of two national partnerships to build the nation's computational infrastructure and address the increasingly complex needs of the academic and research community, government, and industry. Karin has written extensively on issues related to supercomputing, including articles on the ethics of computational and computer science, and the importance of science literacy ina computing world. He has argued consistently that tomorrow's scientific discovery requires increased funding for information-technology research.