Menu

Mel Bernstein elected president of MGHPCC

April 9, 2013

read this story at news@Northeastern
Mel Bern­stein, Northeastern’s senior vice provost for research and grad­uate edu­ca­tion, has been unan­i­mously elected pres­i­dent of the Mass­a­chu­setts Green High Per­for­mance Com­puting Center, a state-​​of-​​the-​​art com­pu­ta­tional infra­struc­ture and col­lab­o­ra­tive research center in Holyoke, Mass., and chair­person of MGHPCC Holyoke Inc., its non­profit affil­iate. He will suc­ceed Tom Chmura in the position.


Mel Bernstein - Photo by Mary Knox Merrill.

Mel Bernstein – Photo by Mary Knox Merrill.

In the last 18 months, the MGHPCC has gone from vision to reality. Offi­cially opening its doors in November 2012, the center is an unprece­dented example of col­lab­o­ra­tion between pri­vate industry, state gov­ern­ment, and five of the commonwealth’s leading research institutions.
North­eastern, Boston Uni­ver­sity, Har­vard Uni­ver­sity, the Mass­a­chu­setts Insti­tute of Tech­nology, and the Uni­ver­sity of Mass­a­chu­setts have each con­tributed $10 mil­lion to sup­port con­struc­tion of the facility, which is the first of its kind in the nation. The part­ner­ship also includes Mass­a­chu­setts Gov. Deval Patrick’s office, Cisco Sys­tems, and EMC Corp., a Hopkinton-​​based data-​​storage com­pany founded by North­eastern engi­neering alumni.
“Now, the ques­tion is how do we move for­ward to max­i­mize both the ben­e­fits of the facility and the col­lab­o­ra­tive spirit that has been devel­oped in building it,” Bern­stein said.
In recent months, MGHPCC has secured external funding from a variety of sources, including fed­eral research and edu­ca­tion grants and a $4.5 mil­lion grant from the Mass­a­chu­setts Life Sci­ences Center. Bern­stein is opti­mistic that by con­tin­uing to encourage col­lab­o­ra­tion among the center’s part­ners, it will become an even more com­pet­i­tive facility in its bid for major research funding.
Already, researchers from across the uni­ver­si­ties have entered into a number of col­lab­o­ra­tive research projects with seed funding from the facility. These are proof-​​of-​​concept projects, laying the foun­da­tion for larger-​​scale work once the MGHPCC is fully oper­a­tional, which Bern­stein expects will happen over the next six months.
“The uni­ver­sity is thrilled that this invest­ment has borne so much suc­cess already,” said provost Stephen W. Director. “It is par­tic­u­larly impor­tant that Mel is now in a posi­tion to carry the vision to the next level of research collaboration.”
Bern­stein, who also serves as pro­fessor of the prac­tice in tech­nology policy and mate­rials engi­neering, earned his doc­torate in met­al­lurgy and mate­rial sci­ence from Columbia Uni­ver­sity. Before joining North­eastern, he held fac­ulty and senior admin­is­tra­tive posi­tions at Carnegie Mellon Uni­ver­sity, Tufts Uni­ver­sity, and the Uni­ver­sity of Mary­land. In 2003, Bern­stein cre­ated the U.S. Depart­ment of Home­land Security’s Office of Uni­ver­sity Pro­grams and served as its director for three years.
“My respon­si­bility at the uni­ver­sity is to build our research base, and part of that has to be to work col­lab­o­ra­tively with other uni­ver­si­ties both in the com­mon­wealth, and across the nation” Bern­stein said. “I plan to use the lessons gained through my work in Wash­ington and else­where to make MGHPCC an even greater success.”

Tags:

Research projects

Foldit
Dusty With a Chance of Star Formation
Checking the Medicine Cabinet to Interrupt COVID-19 at the Molecular Level
Not Too Hot, Not Too Cold But Still, Is It Just Right?​
Smashing Discoveries​
Microbiome Pattern Hunting
Modeling the Air we Breathe
Exploring Phytoplankton Diversity
The Computer Will See You Now
Computing the Toll of Trapped Diamondback Terrapins
Edging Towards a Greener Future
Physics-driven Drug Discovery
Modeling Plasma-Surface Interactions
Sensing Subduction Zones
Neural Networks & Earthquakes
Small Stars, Smaller Planets, Big Computing
Data Visualization using Climate Reanalyzer
Getting to Grips with Glassy Materials
Modeling Molecular Engines
Forest Mapping: When the Budworms come to Dinner
Exploring Thermoelectric Behavior at the Nanoscale
The Trickiness of Talking to Computers
A Genomic Take on Geobiology
From Grass to Gas
Teaching Computers to Identify Odors
From Games to Brains
The Trouble with Turbulence
A New Twist
A Little Bit of This… A Little Bit of That..
Looking Like an Alien!
Locking Up Computing
Modeling Supernovae
Sound Solution
Lessons in a Virtual Test Tube​
Crack Computing
Automated Real-time Medical Imaging Analysis
Towards a Smarter Greener Grid
Heading Off Head Blight
Organic Light-Harvesting Antennae
Art and AI
Excited by Photons
Tapping into an Ocean of Data
Computing Global Change
Star Power
Engineering the Human Microbiome
Computing Social Capital
Computers Diagnosing Disease
All Research Projects

Collaborative projects

ALL Collaborative PROJECTS

Outreach & Education Projects

See ALL Scholarships
100 Bigelow Street, Holyoke, MA 01040