Kintera Advisory Board

 

INFORMATION
EDUCATION
  Name
Company
Title
Address


Telephone
Fax
Larry Smarr
Kintera, Inc.
Director
9605 Scranton Road
Suite 240
San Diego, CA 92121
858-795-3038
858-795-3010
  - BA, Physics, University of Missouri
- Physics Masters degree, Stanford University
- Doctorate, University of Texas at Austin
 

Snapshot of Relevant Experience

20 Years      Work Within Non-Profit/Non-Commercial Sector
18 Years      Policy Analysis and Development
18 Years      Business Operations
15 Years      Internet Industry Experience

 

EXPERIENCE

 

Dr. Smarr has long been a pioneer in the prototyping of a national information infrastructure to support academic research, governmental functions, and industrial competitiveness.

  • In 1983 he initiated the first proposal to the National Science Foundation (NSF) recommending development of a national supercomputer center. This resulted in the creation of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in 1985, where he served as its Director until March, 2000.
  • For the last fifteen years, under Dr. Smarr's leadership and vision, NCSA has been a trailblazer in creating the modern information infrastructure. Dr. Smarr argued strongly for the construction of the first national NSF backbone, which connected the five NSF supercomputer centers in 1986, and rapidly evolved, first into the NSFnet, and then into today's commercial Internet. NCSA greatly broadened the participation in the rapidly growing Net by its creation and distribution of NCSA Telnet in 1985, the most popular way to log onto the internet for many years. A decade ago NCSA brought computational scientists, artists, and computer scientists together to forge the new tool of scientific visualization, producing a series of videos with worldwide influence. NCSA then brought this "power to see" to the personal computer with NCSA Image and Datascope. At the beginning of the 1990s, NCSA Collage and later NCSA Habanero led the way toward synchronous collaboration, an Internet capability that will become widespread early in the next century. Finally, the development of NCSA Mosaic and NCSA's Web server software transformed the Internet into the Web, directly leading to the commercial web browsers and servers universally used today. NCSA also pioneered the style of distributing software freely over the Internet, which has become the standard for the web market today.
  • During this period, Dr. Smarr has worked very closely with industry to assure early adoption of these new technologies. NCSA's Industrial Partner program has, since the beginning of NCSA, closely coupled to leaders of the major categories of the economy such as JP Morgan, Motorola, Caterpillar, American Airlines, Eastman Kodak, Allstate Insurance, Sears, Boeing, Shell Oil, and Kellogg's. As a member of the CSC Vanguard Board, Dr. Smarr worked with Nicholas Negroponte, Alan Kay, Bob Lucky, John Perry Barlow, Gordon Bell, Peter Cochrane and other leading figures in the computer revolution to create five vision meetings a year for roughly 50 CIO-level leaders of industry. In his role as a member of the Fisher Scientific Science and Technology Council, Dr. Smarr helped Fisher review many of the new offerings from biotech startup companies and counseled Fisher on how to become one the earliest large catalog sites on the web. Finally, Dr. Smarr, in his role as Director of NCSA, analyzed future products with many of the leading companies creating today's information infrastructure such as SGI, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Compaq, Sun Microsystems, Intel, Microsoft, Ameritech, AT&T, Qwest, MCI, Cisco, and EMC.
  • In October, 1997, Dr. Smarr became the Director of the National Computational Science Alliance, comprised of over fifty universities, government labs, and corporations linked with NCSA in a national-scale virtual enterprise to prototype the information infrastructure of the 21st Century. In July 2000, Dr. Smarr moved to La Jolla, CA, where he became a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering in the Jacobs School of Engineering at the University of California San Diego. In December, his successful proposal led to the creation of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, where he serves as Institute Director. He continues to be an active member of a number of high-level government committees such as the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee and the Advisory Committee to the Director, NIH.
  • Dr. Smarr is a tireless speaker championing the notion of the revolutionary nature of the Information Age. His views on the Internet, supercomputers, and computational science have been quoted widely in publications including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Time, Newsweek, Fortune, Business Week, Science, and Nature. In November 1998 he was the subject of the Red Herring Profile.
  • He then conducted postdoctoral research at Princeton, Yale, and Cambridge universities. For the three years before he joined the University of Illinois faculty in 1979, Smarr was a Junior Fellow in the Harvard University Society of Fellows. An internationally recognized astrophysicist, Dr. Smarr has conducted observational, theoretical, and computational based research in relativistic astrophysics for fifteen years before he became Director of NCSA.
  • Smarr is a Member of the National Academy of Engineering, and a Fellow of the American Physical Society and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1990 he received the Franklin Institute's Delmer S. Fahrney Medal for Leadership in Science or Technology. He has co-authored with William Kaufmann III, the book, Supercomputing and the Transformation of Science (ISSN 1040-3213).