UAB School of Natural Sciences and Mathematics Names Chair of Computer and Information Sciences

Anthony Skjellum, Ph.D., has been appointed chair of the Department of Computer and Information Sciences in the School of Natural Sciences and Mathematics at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) effective August 1. He succeeds Warren T. Jones, Ph.D., who is retiring. Jones has been chair since 1979.

July 23, 2003

BIRMINGHAM, AL — Anthony Skjellum, Ph.D., has been appointed chair of the Department of Computer and Information Sciences in the School of Natural Sciences and Mathematics at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) effective August 1. He succeeds Warren T. Jones, Ph.D., who is retiring. Jones has been chair since 1979.

Skjellum comes to UAB from Mississippi State University, where he was an associate professor and director of the High Performance Computing Laboratory.

Skjellum gained international attention for his part in the creation of the message passing interface (MPI) standard, which allows connected groups of off-the-shelf computers, called clusters, to work in unison. He also co-authored the book Using MPI: Portable Parallel Programming with the Message Passing Interface, which is considered the standard textbook for programming applications in distributed computing.

“I am honored and excited to have been chosen to lead the Department of Computer and Information Sciences,” Skjellum said. “I am impressed by the opportunities at UAB, both research and educational. UAB is an excellent fit for my background and research.”

Sjkellum added that his primary goal is to enhance the research partnerships among his department and other departments on campus.

“This is one of the best medical centers in the country, and there are many prospects for collaborative work between my department and both the medical establishment and academic side of campus. I am anxious to begin looking for areas, including clinical computing and the high performance computing work being done in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, to which the Department of Computer and Information Sciences can bring our expertise.”

Skjellum’s most recent research includes studying how to obtain more uniform performance from processors and how to redesign parallel middleware — the software that allows processors to work together on large-scale problems — to work more efficiently and support tens of thousands of processors.

“We are very fortunate to have Dr. Tony Skjellum as our new chairman of the Department of Computer and Information Sciences,” said Charles Watkins, Ph.D., associate dean of the UAB School of Natural Sciences & Mathematics. “He is a dynamic, energetic leader in his field who brings to the position an outstanding research reputation, a strong commitment to quality teaching and a strong history of service to his students and colleagues. He has many exciting ideas for cross-campus collaborations, and we are excited about the research opportunities these will afford our students, both graduate and undergraduate. ”

Skjellum has authored numerous papers that have appeared in several refereed journals, including The International Journal of Supercomputer Applications and High Performance Computing, Parallel Computing and Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing, and is on the editorial boards of The International Journal of Supercomputer Applications and High Performance Computing and Concurrency: Practice & Experience.

He earned his bachelor’s degree in physics and his doctoral and master’s degrees in chemical engineering from California Institute of Technology. Before joining Mississippi State, Skjellum was a computer scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, part of the U.S. Department of Energy.