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  • Organization
    University of Iowa

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  • Biography

    Thomas Lee Casavant received the B.S. degree in Computer Science with high distinction in 1982 from the University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa. He received the M.S. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering in 1983, and the Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Iowa in 1986. In 1986, Dr. Casavant joined the School of Electrical Engineering at Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana as an Assistant Professor specializing in the design and analysis of parallel/distributed computing systems, environments, algorithms, and programs. From June 1987 to June 1988, he was Director of the PASM Parallel Processing Project. From July 1988 until July 1989 Dr. Casavant was Director of the Purdue EE School's Parallel Processing Laboratory. He has developed upper-division graduate courses in advanced computer architecture, distributed computing, parallel processing, an undergraduate course in Operating System Engineering, and has been instrumental in the organization of joint Electrical Engineering/Computer Science seminar series on Parallel Processing. In August, 1989, he joined the faculty of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Iowa as an Assistant Professor, was promoted to Associate Professor in 1992, and to Professor in 1999. In 2002, he accepted a joint appointment in the Department of Biomedical Engineering. He was the founder and is a member of the Coordinated Laboratory for Computational Genomics, and has been Director of the Parallel Processing Laboratory since 1989. In 2002 he was named as the founding Director of the UI Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology. In 2006, he was named as the Roy J. Carver Jr. Chair in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology. From July 1993 through June 1994, he was a guest professor with the Department of Informatik (Computer Science) at the (Eidgenossisch Technische Hochschule ETH - Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) in Zurich, Switzerland. In Spring of 2000, he was a guest researcher of the Biochimie et Biophysique des Systemes Integres Laboratory and the CEA/CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique/Commissariat a l'Energie Atomique) in Grenoble, France. From January to June of 2006 he was a guest researcher of the Stockholm Bioinformatics Center and was a Wenner-Gren Foundation Fellow in Stockholm, Sweden. Dr. Casavant has published over 150 technical papers on parallel and distributed computing, Bioinformatics, as well as medical genetics and molecular biology, and has presented his work at tutorials, invited lectures, and conferences in the United States, Asia and Europe. His work in the area of distributed computing includes design and implementation of an operating system for a point-to-point network of work-stations to behave as a single integrated transparent multiprocessor, contributions to the design of the AT&T 3B4000 distributed multiprocessor system at AT&T Bell Laboratories in 1984, research in parallel computer architecture and systems, the design and analysis of load-balancing-based scheduling algorithms, distributed algorithm modeling, routing and task management in parallel systems, graph theory, and research in theory and implementation of trace recovery and programming tools for parallel/distributed computing. Since 1995, he has also become active in the Human Genome Project and has developed systems and tools for computational molecular biology, gene discovery, mapping, and disease identification. These tools include GenoMap and GenoScape for the management and analysis of genetik linkage data, and numerous programs for gene discovery, and novelty analysis. He has been invited to lecture on topics spanning the fields of bioinformatics, computer systems and parallel processing. Dr. Casavant received the Iowa Tau Beta Pi Excellence in Teaching Award in 1992/3, the Iowa Engineering Collegiate Teaching Award in 1998/9, and the University of Iowa Outstanding Mentoring Award in Mathematical and Physical Sciences and Engineering in 2004. He is a Senior Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineering (IEEE) professional society and a member of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) professional society. He has served on the editorial boards of IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Processing (TPDS) and as an associate editor for the Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing (JPDC). He has served as guest editor for the August, 1991 issue of IEEE Computer on ``Distributed Computing Systems,'' as guest editor for the June 1993 issue of JPDC on ``Visualization for Parallel Processing,'' as program vice-chair (1990) and program committee member (1991) for the IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems, as program co-chair (1991) and program committee member (1989, 1990, and 1992) for the IEEE International Computer Software and Applications Conference, and as program committee member for the IEEE Symposium on the Frontiers of Massively Parallel Computation (1992), as well as numerous other conferences.