Shawn Brown Chosen to Lead Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center

Shawn Brown has been selected as the next director of the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC), a joint research center of the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University. Brown, whose work uses high performance computing, informatics and computational modeling to advance research in scientific fields, including neuroscience and public health, will join the PSC on Nov. 27. 

Shawn Brown, next director of the Pittsburgh Supercomputing CenterBrown joins the PSC from McGill University in Montreal where he served as the chief technology officer of the Neurohub Project and associate director of research software development at the McGill Centre for Integrative Neuroscience. While at McGill, he led the development of the infrastructure of two large-scale platforms, Neurohub and CBRAIN, which use high performance computing, machine learning and artificial intelligence to analyze diverse datasets to advance neuroscience and mental health research. 

“We are delighted that Shawn is bringing his expertise, especially in public health and neuroinformatics, back to Pittsburgh,” said Rob A. Rutenbar, senior vice chancellor for research. “In addition to his major achievements in simulations modeling, his collaborative approach and team leadership highly impressed the search committee.” 

This marks Brown’s return to the PSC, having previously served as the director of public health applications. While at PSC from 2005 to 2017, he developed six computational platforms for public health research and published research on obesity prevention, infectious disease and vaccine strategies. He also served on the faculty of the Department of Biostatistics at the Graduate School of Public Health

William Kramer, who was announced as the PSC’s director in July, has chosen to remain at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign. 

Founded in 1986, the PSC is a national leader in supercomputing, having enabled breakthroughs in many disciplines by providing researchers nationwide with access to the most advanced computational systems available. 

Read more about Brown’s appointment at the PSC.  

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