Biography

Dr. James Ahrens is the Director of the Information Science and Technology Institute and a senior scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory. As one of six strategic centers within the National Security Education Center, the Institute supports the implementation of the Laboratory’s IS&T Strategy and promotes a strong sense of community among LANL’s IS&T researchers. The Institute provides outreach to the international community and serves as a mechanism for attracting students, postdocs, visiting scientists, and visiting faculty in information science and technology relevant to the national security missions of the Laboratory.

Dr. Ahrens has extensive management experience as a technical program manager. His primary research interests are visualization, computer graphics, data science and parallel systems. Ahrens is author of over 100 peer reviewed papers and the founder/design lead of ParaView, an open-source visualization tool designed to handle extremely large data. ParaView is broadly used for scientific visualization, has been downloaded over a million times, and is in use at supercomputing and scientific centers worldwide. He has over twenty awards as a principal or co-investigator from the U.S. Department of Energy and the U.S. National Science Foundation. These awards have evolved in scope over the course of his career to multi-million dollar, interdisciplinary, data analysis/visualization projects involving multiple partners from academia, laboratories and industry. Ahrens is currently the U.S. Exascale Computing Project’s Data and Visualization lead for seven storage, data management and visualization projects that will be a key part of a vibrant exascale supercomputing application and software ecosystem.

Dr. Ahrens provides leadership to the international visualization and graphics community. In November 2018, he was elected Chair of the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Visualization and Graphics (VGTC). The VGTC is the Visualization and Graphics Technical Committee, the governance body that oversees and sponsors all IEEE visualization and virtual reality conferences including VIS, VR, ISMAR, Pacific Vis, and EuroVis (as a co-sponsor). He is active in conference organization as the general chair for IEEE Visualization in 2017 and as papers chair in 2015 and 2016. He helped start the successful Large Data Analysis and Visualization Symposium (LDAV) held at IEEE Visualization.

Dr. Ahrens received his B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1989 and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Washington in 1996.