The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the IEEE Computer Society (IEEE-CS) will jointly present the inaugural Ken Kennedy Award to Francine Berman, vice president for research at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Berman is being recognized for her efforts to build a national cyberinfrastructure.

  Francine Berman

Berman will receive the 2009 Kennedy Award at the SC09 Conference November 14-20 in Portland, Ore.

Berman was cited for “her influential leadership in the design, development, and deployment of national-scale cyberinfrastructure.” She is a leading advocate for the development of a national-scale cyberinfrastructure for the access, use, stewardship, and preservation of the digital data that forms the foundation of the Information Age.

ACM and IEEE-CS co-sponsor the Kennedy Award, which was established in 2009 to recognize substantial contributions to programmability and productivity in computing and significant community service or mentoring contributions. It was named for Ken Kennedy, the founder of Rice University’s nationally ranked computer science program, who was one of the world’s foremost experts on high-performance computing. 

Berman joined Rensselaer in August 2009 from the University of California, San Diego, where she served a High Performance Computing Endowed Chair and director of the San Diego Supercomputer Center.

Berman is widely recognized as a pioneer in the effort to build a stronger digital infrastructure in the United States, known as a cyberinfrastructure, and has been named as a technology leader by Newsweek , BusinessWeek , and IEEE Spectrum .

Berman is one of the two founding principal investigators of the National Science Foundation’s TeraGrid project, the largest open scientific research infrastructure connecting supercomputer centers across the nation. She also served as director of the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure, a consortium of 41 research groups and institutions with the goal of building a national infrastructure to support research and education in science and engineering.  

In addition to these leadership roles, she has served on a variety of national and international committees, including the Engineering Advisory Committee of the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of General Medical Sciences Advisory Committee of the National Institutes of Health, and the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology Board of Trustees. She is currently the co-chair for the international Blue Ribbon Task Force for Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access, whose goal is to develop economically sustainable strategies to preserve our often fragile digital information.

Her research places her at the forefront of information and communication in the increasingly digital age. She has written more than 165 articles, editorials, and reports on her research, which spans the areas of high-performance computing, grid computing, scheduling, programming environments and middleware, cyberinfrastructure, and digital data stewardship and preservation. She is a fellow of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) and senior member of the IEEE.

Berman is a native of California, and earned her bachelor’s in mathematics in 1973 from the University of California, Los Angeles. She went on to earn her master’s and doctorate in mathematics from the University of Washington. She began her teaching career at Purdue University in 1979, and joined UCSD in 1984.

Contact: Gabrielle DeMarco
Phone: (518) 276-6542
E-mail: demarg@rpi.edu