IDSC welcomes James R. “Jim” Bottum as Director of Strategic Initiatives. In this role, he will be responsible for building collaborative alliances and partnerships with academia, industry, and community organizations.

“As I look at the national landscape of emerging data science initiatives, IDSC appears to have some unique qualities that I find very exciting. IDSC is being built upon the very successful foundation of the University’s Center for Computational Science (CCS), founded in 2007. In addition to the significant computational and data infrastructure this affords IDSC, CCS also built up a significant professional staff to assist researchers with a diverse set of large-scale data and simulation needs. Coupling these capabilities with IDSC’s forward-looking set of programmatic areas provides me a very rich base for developing strategic partnerships,” Jim said.

Prior to joining IDSC, Jim was Founding Director of the Center of Excellence in Next Generation Computing and Creativity, as well as a Research Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Clemson University until his retirement in July 2019. (He continues as Research Professor Emeritus in the Clemson Emeritus College.) Jim is also an Internet2 Presidential Fellow, and consults with the American Indian Higher Education Consortium (AIHEC) on a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to improve cyberinfrastructure at our Nation’s Tribal Colleges and Universities.

In addition, Jim was Vice Provost and CIO for Computing and IT at Clemson. From July 2006 to August 2016, he led Clemson’s efforts to build a state-of-the-art cyberinfrastructure for education, research, and service. These efforts resulted in Clemson becoming a Top 100 Supercomputing Site on the TOP500 world list, linking Clemson to the national research infrastructure, and bridging academia and IT staff together on innovative initiatives. Prior to Clemson, Jim was Purdue University’s first CIO beginning in August of 2001. And before Purdue, he was the Executive Director for the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Jim was also the original Principal Investigator on the national Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Research and Educational Facilitation (ACI-REF) Project [NSF Award #1341935], a $6 million dollar award to enable a national network of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Research and Education Facilitators (ACI-REFs) to broaden the impact of advanced computing resources at 6 member campuses. This resulted in an NSF Research Coordination Networks program entitled the “Campus Research Computing Consortium (CaRCC)” made up of 28 campuses from around the nation that provide a national forum for the exchange and dissemination of best practices, expertise, and technologies, and enabled the advancement of campus-based research computing activities. Jim has also served as an Expert for the NSF.