Dr. Ian Foster is Senior Scientist and Distinguished Fellow, and also director of the Data Science and Learning Division, at Argonne National Laboratory, and the Arthur Holly Compton Distinguished Service Professor of Computer Science at the University of Chicago. Ian received a BSc degree from the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, and a PhD from Imperial College, United Kingdom, both in computer science. His research deals with distributed, parallel, and data-intensive computing technologies, and innovative applications of those technologies to scientific problems in such domains as materials science, climate change, and biomedicine. Foster is a fellow of the AAAS, ACM, BCS, and IEEE, and an Office of Science Distinguished Scientists Fellow.
Research
Focus Areas: Systems, Scientific Computing, Data Management
In my research, I seek to develop tools and techniques that allow people to use high-performance computing technologies to do qualitatively new things. This involves investigations of parallel and distributed languages, algorithms, and communication; and also focused work on applications. I am particularly interested in using high-performance networking to incorporate remote compute and information resources into local computational environments.
