Professor Hazeleger serves as Director of the Netherlands eScience Center since 2014, a research centre that connects digital technologies with applications in all scientific domains. He has a chair in Climate Dynamics at Wageningen University.
At Wageningen University and Reading University, he studied meteorology. He received his PhD in 1999 in physical oceanography from Utrecht University, after which he went to Columbia University in New York to conduct research on decadal climate variability.
In 2002 he started working at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI) on climate dynamics, climate scenarios and the development of global Earth system models. Professor Hazeleger initiated and led the EC-Earth project, a European Earth system modelling consortium that develops a state-of-the-art Earth system model based on ECMWF's numerical weather prediction model. Until 2014 Professor Hazeleger led climate research divisions at KNMI. In 2013 he served as Acting Director of a research department on Climate and Seismology Research at KNMI.
Professor Hazeleger has (co)-authored over 100 refereed publications. He serves on a number of international and national science committees on meteorology, climate and data science, including the SRG of the UK Met Office and the advisory committee of the Swedish eScience Centre, and he leads the Big Data national science initiative in the Netherlands.
Dr. Richard Loft is the Director of the Technology Development Division in the Computational and Information Systems Laboratory (CISL) at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). In this capacity, he oversees CISL’s R&D efforts in areas such as technology tracking, algorithmic research, and the development of useful computational tools and services. Dr. Loft received a Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Colorado, Boulder in 1988. In 1989, he joined Thinking Machine Corporation, where he worked as an application engineer. Dr. Loft has worked at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) since 1994. He has authored over 30 peer reviewed publications and two book chapters. At the IEEE Supercomputing Conference in 2001, his team received an honorable mention Gordon Bell prize for developing the High Order Method Modeling Environment (HOMME), a scalable dynamical core which was subsequently integrated into the widely-used Community Earth System Model.
Simon McIntosh-Smith is a full Professor of High Performance Computing at the University of Bristol in the UK. He began his career as a microprocessor architect at Inmos and STMicroelectronics in the early 1990s, before co-designing the world's first fully programmable GPU at Pixelfusion in 1999. In 2002 he co-founded ClearSpeed Technology where, as Director of Architecture and Applications, he co-developed the first modern many-core HPC accelerators. He now leads the High Performance Computing Research Group at the University of Bristol, where his research focuses on performance portability and application based fault tolerance. He plays a key role in designing and procuring HPC services at the local, regional and national level, including the UK’s national HPC server, Archer. In 2016 he led the successful bid by the GW4 Alliance along with the UK’s Met Office and Cray, to design and build ‘Isambard’, the world’s first production, ARMv8-based supercomputer.