Faculty Profiles

Professor Smarr is a widely-quoted authority on the future of information technology and telecommunications. He is a pioneer in prototyping a national information infrastructure to support academic research, governmental functions, and industrial competitiveness, and played a pivotal role in the development of the Internet and high-performance computing. Smarr created and led one of the first NSF-funded supercomputing center (see bio), and was an early advocate for the first national NSFnet backbone, which evolved into today's Internet. The first Web browser--NCSA Mosaic, the predecessor of Netscape Navigator--originated at NCSA while he was Director. At Cal-(IT)², Smarr has authored an interdisciplinary approach to the institute's goal of extending the reach of the current information infrastructure throughout the physical world to enable anytime/anywhere access. That approach includes an explicit emphasis on core technologies, applications, and systems integration enabled by telecommunication and information technology. Smarr champions the build-out of "living laboratories" under Cal-(IT)²'s aegis to explore applications of sensor networks and high-speed wireless and optical communications.

Capsule Bio:

Larry Smarr, the Harry E. Gruber Professor of Computer Science and Information Technologies, joined the UCSD faculty in 2000 and became the founding director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology [Cal(IT)²] in December 2000. Prior to UCSD, he was the founder and 15-year director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and the National Computational Science Alliance, both based at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana (UIUC). He earned a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Texas at Austin in 1975, then did research at Princeton and Harvard before joining the UIUC faculty in 1979. Smarr is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was a member of the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee, and is currently on the Advisory Committee to the Director of the National Institutes of Health and on the NASA Advisory Council.