About the Authors
Jian He earned a bachelor degree in computer engineering in July 1996 from Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Nanjing, China. After that, she worked for three years at METSTAR Meteorological Radar System Company, a joint venture by Lockheed Martin Corporation and China Meteorological Administration in Beijing, China. In August 2000, she began graduate study in computer science at Virginia Tech, and defended her Ph.D. work in the area of parallel global optimization in 2007. During her graduate studies, Jian did a summer internship in the Advanced Computations Department at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, where she worked on dynamic flux balance analysis of metabolic networks. Jian won Outstanding Graduate Research Awards for both her master's and doctoral work at Virginia Tech.
Layne T. Watson received the B.A. degree (magna cum laude) in psychology and mathematics from the University of Evansville, Indiana, in 1969, and the Ph.D. degree in mathematics from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 1974. He is a professor of computer science and mathematics at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. His research interests include fluid dynamics, solid mechanics, numerical analysis, optimization, parallel computation, mathematical software, image processing, and bioinformatics. He has worked for USNAD Crane, Sandia National Laboratories, and General Motors Research Laboratories and served on the faculties of the University of Michigan and Michigan State University, East Lansing, before coming to Virginia Tech. His professional service includes stints as associate editor of ORSA Journal on Computing, SIAM Journal on Optimization, Computational Optimization and Applications, Evolutionary Optimization, Engineering Computations, and the International Journal of High Performance Computing Applications. He has published well over 250 refereed journal articles and 150 refereed conference papers. He is a fellow of the IEEE, the National Institute of Aerospace, and the International Society of Intelligent Biological Medicine.
Masha Sosonkina graduated from Virginia Tech in 1997 with a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science and Applications. After that, she was first an assistant and then associate professor at the University of Minnesota. Since 2003, Dr. Sosonkina has been a scientist at the U.S. Department of Energy Ames Laboratory and an adjunct associate professor at Iowa State University. Dr. Sosonkina's research interests include high performance computing and applications, computational science and engineering, parallel numerical algorithms, performance analysis, adaptive algorithms, and distributed and grid computing.