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Inside Iowa State
Apr. 17, 1998

Computation director candidates visit this month

by Skip Derra

Campus visits have begun for four finalists in the search for a new director for academic information technology.

The four candidates are Stephen Elbert, program manager at the U.S. Department of Energy, Germantown, Md.; Peter Siegel, director of networking and computer systems at Cornell University Information Technologies, Ithaca, N.Y.; Thomas Moberg, special assistant to the president of the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), Washington, D.C.; and Samuel Trickey, professor of physics and chemistry at the University of Florida, Gainesville.

The director for academic information technology oversees a staff of 65 at the Computation Center, Iowa State's center for academic computing and information technologies. The new director succeeds George Strawn, who has been on leave from Iowa State since 1995 to serve with the National Science Foundation.

Each candidate's campus visit includes a public forum from 8:30 to 10 a.m. in 144 Durham. Elbert and Siegel visited campus this week. Moberg's forum is April 21, and Trickey's forum is April 24.

Elbert is the program manager for Grand Challenge Applications at the DOE. He also worked on DOE's $100 million Computational Science Initiative for FY2000, the Large Scale Networks Program and the High Performance Computing Research Facilities Program. Prior to this, he was manager of the Scalable Computing Lab at Ames Laboratory and a computational chemist at the Ames Lab.

Elbert received a B.S. in chemistry from Iowa State and a Ph.D. in theoretical chemistry from the University of Washington, Seattle.

Siegel is responsible for support of Cornell University's computing systems for administration, research and library, and for the campus communications infrastructure. Previously, he was executive director of the Cornell Theory Center for high performance computing, and deputy director of the Cornell National Supercomputer Facility.

Siegel earned a B.A. in linguistics from the University of Hawaii, Honolulu, and M.A.s in linguistics (logical theory) from Cornell University and (semantic and syntactic theory) from the University of Hawaii.

As special assistant to the AAMC president, Moberg conducts research, assessment and outreach related to the impact of information technology on the medical profession. Previously, Moberg worked at Kenyon College, Gambier, Ohio, first as vice president of information and computing services and then as director of academic computing.

Moberg earned a B.A. in mathematics from Bemidji State University, Minnesota; an M.S. in mathematics from North Dakota State University, Fargo; and a Ph.D. in statistics from the University of Iowa.

Trickey has been on the physics faculty at the University of Florida for nearly 30 years. From 1991 to 1996, he led the Office of Information Technologies and Services at Florida. From 1982 to 1993, Trickey led the J.C. Slater Memorial Computing Laboratory, the Quantum Theory Project and the physics and chemistry departments.

Trickey earned a B.A. in physics from Rice University, Houston; and an M.S. in physics and Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Texas A&M University, College Station.

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