Ashok Srinivasan, PhD

Dr. Ashok Srinivasan is the William Nystul Eminent Scholar Chair and Professor. He obtained his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Santa Barbara, with a dissertation on Computational Issues in the Solution of Liquid Crystalline Polymer Flow Problems. He then performed postdoctoral research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he developed the SPRNG parallel random number generation software, which is used by major research groups around the world. He subsequently worked at the Indian Institute of Technology – Bombay, and UCSB, before joining Florida State University, where he was a faculty for 17 years.

Srinivasan’s research has been widely recognized. He was a Fulbright Senior Research Scholar and has received Best Paper awards at multiple international conferences, including the International Conference on Parallel Processing (ICPP). He has given around 30 invited talks in universities and labs in the USA and abroad, such as at the University of California, San Diego, and Oak Ridge National Lab. He has been PI or co-PI on research grants for around $ 4 million from the National Science Foundation, Department of Energy, Department of Defense, etc. He has reviewed proposals for the National Academies, National Science Foundation, National Institutes for Health, and the Fulbright program.

Srinivasan is keen on fostering student research and in service to the professional community. He is a founding co-chair of the Student Research Symposium at the IEEE/ACM International Conference on High-Performance Computing, Data, and Analytics (HiPC). He has organized around 15 professional events and has served on technical program committees for over 40 international conferences, including SC and IPDPS. He has collaborated with researchers in industry and national labs, such as at IBM and Argonne National Lab, and has been involved in interdisciplinary activities with experts from a variety of fields, such as biochemistry, bioinformatics, chemical engineering, epidemiology, finance, materials, mathematics, mechanical engineering, physics, and urban planning. Further details on his work are available at http://www.cs.fsu.edu/~asriniva.

Degrees & Institutions:
Ph.D. Computer Science, University of California, Santa Barbara, 1996.
M.S. Polymer Engineering, University of Akron, 1992.
B.S. Tech (Honours) Chemical Engineering, Regional Engineering College, Tiruchirapalli, 1987.

Research:
My research expertise lies in high-performance computing, with a focus on applications of supercomputing to science and public policy. I lead Project VIPRA (www.cs.fsu.edu/vipra), which is a multi-university effort for simulation-based analysis of public policy options to reduce the likelihood of infection spread through air travel. Our results have been reported in over 75 news outlets around the world, such as Economist and Fox News, and were listed among 12 major scientific breakthroughs using the Blue Waters supercomputer at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications.