Eugene Williams grew up in Jackson, Mississippi; Brooklyn, New York; and Montreal, Canada. He .is a graduate of Jackson State University with dual Bachelor of Science degrees in computer science and mathematics, and holds a Masters of Science in mathematics from the University of California at Berkeley and a Masters in Business Administration from New York University.

Before coming to Argonne, Eugene worked as a systems analyst with Eastman Kodak and an independent consultant. in Canada, France, England, Japan, and Chicago

Eugene's first exposure to Argonne National Laboratory was through an independent consulting assignment in 1998, when he divided his time between a consulting for Abbott Laboratories, as a software engineer and chemist, and working for Argonne on a procurement application for the entire laboratory. In 1999, he went to work with MCI-Worldcom on an assignment doing database administration and Oracle Forms development, but returned to Argonne in 2000 as a senior software engineer doing client-server and Oracle database development. Williams is currently a senior systems analyst and team leader working with web technology and relational databases for various business units at Argonne.

Active Server Pages
Java
Oracle database
Project management
Client interaction

Rob Jacob
Computational Scientist

Rob Jacob grew up in downstate Illinois and in Dallas, Texas.
As an undergraduate, he attended University of Texas at Austin where he received a Bachelors of Science degrees in Physics and in Mathematics. He holds a Ph.D. is in atmospheric science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Dr. Jacob has been associated with the Argonne's Math & Computer Science Division (MCS) since 1994 when his advisor began a collaboration on climate models with Dr. Ian
Foster atMCS.

"My current position as an assistant computational scientist is my first job at Argonne. I started in summer of 2000. I'm working on the next version of the Community Climate System Model. This is a very complex model of the Earth's climate and is used to predict climate change. [This model] could lead to better and more detailed predictions of future climate."

Dr. Jacob and his wife live on the near northwest side of Chicago. His hobbies are music, movies and reading.

climate model, climate change,
paleoclimate,
thermohaline circulation,
Milankovitch cycles,
supercomputer,
scientific application,
Fortran.

Sheri Mickelson
Applications Software Specialist
(i.e. computer programmer)

"I work for the University of Chicago here at Argonne National Laboratory. I grew up here in the suburbs of Chicago and I still live out here with my husband and my one year old son. I currently hold Bachelor of Art degrees in Computer Science and Psychology from North Central College. I started here at Argonne four years ago through the summer student program when I was a senior in college. My main job at that time was to visualize climate models in virtual reality. I have also run climate models to simulate the Perfect Storm. Currently I work on creating user interfaces that help make climate modeling simpler. I'll be talking mainly about the visualization process. I plan to demonstrate Vis5D and show some of the simulations we have done."

Some important words in her work--

GUI - Graphical User Interface
Visualization
Virtual Reality
C, C++, Java

Jay Larson
Computational Scientist

Dr. Larson grew up in Des Moines, Iowa and attended the Des Moines public schools. He writes:

"Throughout school, I did fairly well in math and science classes. Around eighth or ninth grade, I got interested in astronomy, and spent a lot of weekends and summer nights staying up late and stargazing. About this time I started reading quite a bit about astronomy and cosmology, which got me interested in physics. By some point in my sophomore year in high school, I had decided I wanted to be a scientist. The summer after my junior year I went to an NSF-sponsored summer program in physics and computing, which is where I first learned
computer programming."

Dr. Larson holds a Bachelor's Degree in Physics and Mathematics from Drake University and M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Theoretical Physics.from the College of William and Mary.

"When I began college, I first majored in Astronomy and Physics, but became convinced that Mathematics was more compatible with the kinds of things in Astronomy that interested me. After my Ph.D, I switched fields from Plasma Physics to Climate. This was a relatively easy transition as my Ph.D. research was in the area of dynamical systems and chaos theory, both of which are important issues in both climate and meteorology."

The first two years after his Ph.D. Dr. Larson worked on a climate change project in Sydney, Australia, analyzing output from climate model sensitivity experiments. He stayed on in Australia for another two years working in Canberra for the Australian National University's Supercomputing Center on performance studies of climate models. In 1996 he returned to the U.S. and began working for the University of Maryland and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.

"At this point my work was a blend of high-performance computing and numerical weather prediction. I worked on the analysis portion of NASA's weather forecasting system."

Dr. Larson has been an 'Assistant Computational Scientist.' at Argonne since 1999. He reports that his most interesting work at Argonne is the Model Coupling Toolkit (MCT), a collection of software tools that extends parallel computing infrastructure provided by the Message-Passing Interface library to allow coupling message-passing parallel codes in parallel coupled computer models.

"My main outside interests are reading, movie-going and travel. Since I'm single, I usually add extra time to my business trips to play tourist. This past weekend I saw Hoover Dam, and spent a day driving across the Mojave Desert, visiting Mojave National Preserve and Joshua Tree National Park."