Dan Reed is the Chancellor’s Eminent Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, as well as the Director of the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI), a venture supported by the State of North Carolina and three universities – the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Duke University and North Carolina State University – that is exploring the interactions of computing technology with the sciences, arts and humanities. Reed also serves as Vice-Chancellor for Information Technology for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Dr. Reed is a former member of President George W. Bush’s Information Technology Advisory Committee where he chaired the subcommittee on computational science. He is chair of the board of directors for the Computing Research Association (CRA), which represents the interests of the major academic departments and industrial research laboratories. He was previously Director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he also led National Computational Science Alliance, a consortium of roughly fifty academic institutions and national laboratories that is developing next-generation software infrastructure of scientific computing. He was also one of the principal investigators and chief architect for the NSF TeraGrid.  He received his PhD in computer science in 1983 from Purdue University.