People
Comprised of physical scientists, engineers and computer scientists with advanced degrees, research experience and software application development experience, Tech-X Corporation is committed to leveraging a unique combination of scientific and programming excellence.
At Tech-X Corporation we have a team skilled in project management, and community understanding and alignment through presentation and conversation. We specialize in algorithm development, object-oriented and distributed system programming in C/C++, Java, Fortran 90/95, Python, Web services and CORBA for scientific and engineering applications. Tech-X Corporation has developed plasma and particle accelerator simulations to facilitate both engineering design and fundamental scientific understanding.
Our scientists are experienced scientific researchers and software engineers, and are in leading positions in national computational efforts sponsored by the Department of Energy and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. In addition, prior to joining Tech-X Corp, many of our staff have contributed to projects and programs at prestigious and innovative centers of scientific research, including:
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Los Alamos National Laboratory
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Sandia National Laboratory
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Oak Ridge National Laboratory
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Northrop Grumman Corporation
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The University of Colorado
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The University of Texas Institute of Fusion Studies
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The Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory
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The Institute of Astronomy, Zürich
Executive Managers
Click on a name in the list to see a biographical summary.
John R. Cary |
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David Bruhwiler |
Svetlana Shasharina |
Mark L. Green |
Peter Stoltz |
Ed Kase |
Peter Messmer |
Scott Kruger |
Larry Nelson |
David A. Alexander |
Anne Hammond |
Executive Management Summary Biographies
Click on a name in a biographical summary to view the Tech-X manager's full biographical web page.
John R. Cary, Ph.D.
Chief Executive Officer
Professor John R. Cary graduated with a BA in Math and Physics from the University of California, Irvine, and received his MA and Ph.D. in Physics from the University of California at Berkeley. Prof. Cary spent two years at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and four years at the Institute for Fusion Studies (University of Texas).
In 1984, Prof. Cary went to the University of Colorado (CU) at Boulder, where he has been the primary graduate thesis advisor for nine graduate students. At CU, Prof. Cary has served as Department Chair, Director, and Area Teaching Scholar. In the latter position he mentored all incoming faculty in the Natural Sciences in teaching and proposal writing.
Professor Cary's research is in the areas of computational physics, plasma physics, beam physics, and nonlinear dynamics. He has published more than eighty articles in refereed journals, and has given more than fifty invited talks. His current interests include high-performance computing and distributed computing, especially as applied to the analysis of physical systems.
David Bruhwiler, Ph.D.
Vice President, Accelerator Technology
David Bruhwiler earned a doctorate in plasma and accelerator physics from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1990. Dr. Bruhwiler has fifteen years of experience in the development of high-performance Fortran and C/C++ codes for the design and simulation of particle accelerators, free-electron lasers (FEL) and other beam and plasma devices.
Dr. Bruhwiler joined Tech-X Corporation in the Fall of 1997, where his work has focused on the development of particle-in-cell (PIC) codes for simulating high-power RF devices and advanced concepts for plasma-based particle acceleration, with emphasis on parallel computing techniques, graphical user interfaces (GUI) and 3-D visualization.
Mark L. Green, Ph.D.
Vice President, Systems Integration Group
Mark Green received his B.S. in Chemical Engineering, M.S. in Water Resources and Hydraulics, and Ph.D. in Environmental Engineering from the State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo. Dr. Green completed his post-doctoral research at the Computer Science and Engineering Department and the Center for Computational Research SUNY Buffalo developing Portal/Gateway user interfaces, data and computational grid middleware, and cyberinfrastructure before becoming a staff member.
Dr. Green's recent work involved the development and implementation of Grid-enabling Application Templates (GATs) for scientific and engineering application grid Portals/Gateways. This cyberinfrastructure specialized in the integration and deployment of user community applications and the consolidation of complex, heterogeneous and homogeneous environments into large-scale coordinated grid-enabled compute and storage element resources which led to the Multi-tiered Portal Architecture (MPA) development. Mark has also spent a significant portion of his career developing and optimizing large-scale high-performance distributed and parallel processing applications involving process models, analysis models, visualization and geographic information systems.
Ed Kase
Vice President, Marketing and Business Development
Mr. Kase received his BS in mechanical engineering from Clarkson University. He has worked in scientific computing and numerical modeling as an engineer and software developer at General Electric, Visual Numerics, Inc. and other organizations.
Mr. Kase has extensive experience in marketing, sales and business development for analysis and visualization software products and services. Mr. Kase is responsible for developing opportunities and commercial applications for technologies developed by Tech-X Corporation.
Scott Kruger, Ph.D.
Vice President, Fusion
Dr. Scott Kruger received his doctorate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1999. After obtaining his doctorate, Scott joined Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) to work on computational magnetohydrodynamics, specializing in applications of massively-parallel initial-value simulation of tokamak plasmas at the
Dr. Kruger's current interests continue to be in the application of high performance computing to solving problems in understanding fusion-relevant plasmas.
Peter Messmer, Ph.D.
Vice President, Space Applications
Dr. Messmer received his Ph.D from the Institute of Astronomy, ETH Zürich, Switzerland. His research interests and skills include numerical plasma physics and its application to astronomy, parallel and distributed computing, algorithms, software tools and applications, grid technologies and Web technologies. Dr. Messmer was a research assistant for the Swiss Center for Scientific Computing and the Institute of Astronomy in Zürich.
Dr. Messmer is expert in various computing languages, including Fortran, C++, Java and Perl as well as IDL and AVS. He has conducted numerous computing projects, including large-scale plasma simulations on a Beowulf-Cluster, parallelization of a PIC plasma simulation code, and vectorization of a Beam-Propagation code.
Svetlana Shasharina, Ph.D.
Vice President, Computational Infrastructure
Dr. Svetlana Shasharina graduated from Moscow State University and received her Ph.D. from the General Physics Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Dr. Shasharina has worked on a number of computational science projects, and has published on the uses of object-oriented programming in scientific computing, distributed computing, and the development of intuitive scientific modeling applications and libraries.
As a Senior Research Associate at the University of Colorado, Dr. Shasharina taught at both the graduate and undergraduate levels. At Tech-X Corporation, Dr. Shasharina is a principal investigator of many projects, combining C/C++, Java and distributed (CORBA, grid) programming and leading accelerator physics projects that include accelerator modeling and differential algebra. She has also participated in development of the National Transport Code Collaboration demo code.
Peter Stoltz, Ph.D.
Vice President, Beam-Plasma Interactions
Dr. Stoltz received a BS in Physics from the University of California-Berkeley in 1989 and his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Colorado in 1996. Dr. Stoltz completed his post-doctoral research at Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory developing particle-in-cell simulation codes for heavy-ion fusion beams. He has also worked Sandia National Laboratories as a post-doctoral research scientist developing magneto-hydrodynamic simulation codes for z-pinch x-ray sources.
Dr. Stoltz designed and implemented a graphical user interface for the PPPL heavy-ion code using IDL, and wrote a GUI tool in IDL for post-processing simulation results while at Sandia. Some of his recent work involved the development of a scientific steering package based on Python where he also used MPI to prototype a parallel version of that scripting language. Dr. Stoltz also headed the development of the parallel IDL prototype developed by Tech-X Corporation in 2002.
Larry Nelson
Controller
Mr. Nelson received a B.S. in Accounting from the University of Colorado (CU) at Boulder in 1969. After a one-year position at a bank in Denver, he became employed at CU, initially in the Accounting Department, and soon thereafter in the Office of Contracts and Grants (OCG). OCG is responsible for processing and administering all of the sponsored research proposals and awards at CU (more than $250 million annually). In 2001, Mr. Nelson was a recipient of the University of Colorado?s Robert L. Stearns Award for Exceptional Service, the highest honor bestowed upon CU faculty and staff for exceptional teaching, research, or service.
In 1981, Mr. Nelson became the Director of OCG and served in that capacity until his retirement in 2004. In February 2005, he joined Tech-X as its first Controller. Mr. Nelson brings to Tech-X his 34 years of experience with sponsored research, federal funding, and contract management.
David A. Alexander
Director, Quality Assurance & Releases
Dr. David A. Alexander has been with Tech-X since it began to really grow in 1997, three years after the formation. While working in many areas, Dr. Alexander has maintained a focus on the user and learner experience. This has included work on intuitive interfaces across the major desktop and laptop platforms and software that simplifies data analysis and simulation execution. His most recent projects center around the development of a unified interface for setting up, running, and analyzing results from large-scale parallel electromagnetic simulations.
Dr. Alexander received a Ph.D. from the University of Colorado (CU) at Boulder in 1996 for plasma physics research in the area of confinement properties of a fusion device. During his thesis research, Dr. Alexander developed numerous FORTRAN programs that automate data taking and data analysis in plasma. Continuing on at CU, he developed interactive Java applets in the academic area of planetary science for the Solar System Collaboratory Website.
In the early years at Tech-X, Dr. Alexander developed educational Java applets and has produced a commercial software package and published in this area. He moved on to become an expert in developing Java graphical user interfaces and has accumulated extensive experience in Web Service technologies. From work with the Open Science Grid middleware to build a system for the Java Analysis Studio package developed by Dr. Tony Johnson at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, which makes it easier for the user to leverage Grid resources in high energy physics data analysis, to work on a user system to easily construct data analysis work flows within the software framework used by the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment at the Large Hadron Collider -- Dr. Alexander has been involved in the petascale data analysis community for many years. He has been a major author and architect in many projects involving client-server middle layers such as RMI, CORBA, and Web Services and rich clients such as Java applications, Web page coding, and browser scripting.
Anne Hammond
Director, Information Technology
Anne Hammond managed a high performance visualization lab at the University of Colorado, Boulder, associated with the Department of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences, and NSF and NASA research projects. As the interface between the nation's high performance computational centers, and the University research environment, she was involved in Grand Challenge Applications for data analysis and networking. For these environments, Ms. Hammond specified the graphics engines and associated software, and set up the volumetric test data, resulting in production of some of the first movies of full-disk simulations of dynamo action in the Sun, and of rotating solar convection including the affects of magnetic fields.
Ms. Hammond implemented the distributed computing infrastructure at JILA, a joint institute of the University of Colorado and the National Bureau of Standards. In this role, Anne evaluated research project computing and visualization requirements, and followed through to the acquisition of equipment and implementation of scientific codes. JILA is one of the nation's leading scientific institutes.
In 2004, Anne became involved with the Center for Integrated Plasma Studies, at the University of Colorado. As manager of the Center's research clusters, she researched parallel computing and storage requirements of the various user groups, eventually more than doubling the Center's parallel computing and data storage capacity.
Tech-X Staff Contact Directory