Daniel A. Reed, a key architect in national high-performance computing initiatives who joined the University in January, has been appointed vice chancellor for information technology and chief information officer.

The appointment, approved by the UNC Board of Trustees, takes effect June 1, Chancellor James Moeser announced on May 10.

Reed also will hold the title of Chancellor's Eminent Professor. He will continue as founding director of the new interdisciplinary Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI), which is based at Carolina in partnership with Duke and N.C. State universities.

"In Dan Reed, we have a scholar, colleague and administrator with impeccable credentials and the kind of vision and expertise in the information technology field that will help keep Carolina at the forefront of American public higher education," Moeser said.

"We were thrilled when he joined Carolina as a world-class faculty member keenly interested in collaborating with our sister research campuses and the Research Triangle Park," he said. "Now we have an eminent scholar holding the University's highest policy-making and leadership position in information technology."

As vice chancellor, Reed will serve as the University's senior technology leader, overseeing the delivery of administrative and academic information technology support to students, faculty and staff campuswide. Reed will succeed Interim Vice Chancellor Steve Jarrell, who came out of retirement to begin those duties in July 2002 after Marian Moore accepted a similar position at Boston College.

As part of this transition, Reed will become the University's first Chancellor's Eminent Professor, a new $3 million endowed professorship funded with an anonymous private gift to the Carolina First campaign. This post will replace Reed's current appointment as Kenan Eminent Professor, which required serving solely as a faculty member without administrative duties .The Kenan Eminent category of $3 million endowed professorships was made possible as part of a $27 million commitment from the William R. Kenan Jr. Charitable Trust to Carolina First.

Reed will continue leading RENCI, which explores the interactions of computing technology with the arts, humanities, sciences and engineering. The institute will partner with business leaders to enhance the competitiveness of North Carolina industries. A "Renaissance team" approach is bringing scientists, engineers, artists and institute staff together to explore interdisciplinary approaches to scholarship, discovery and education.

Carolina will appoint a new senior associate vice chancellor in information technology, reporting to Reed, who will help manage day-to-day information technology operations, including coordination with schools, departments and units, in ways that will most effectively advance the University's mission of teaching, research and public service.

Reed came to Carolina after more than 20 years at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He spearheaded more than $100 million in construction to create a new information technology quadrangle at Illinois. Before coming to Chapel Hill, he was director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), a 400-person research institute that develops computing infrastructure in support of scientific research. NCSA was the birthplace of the modern web browser that sparked the Internet revolution.

Reed's work focuses on designing high-speed computers and providing new computing capabilities for scholars in science, medicine, engineering and the humanities. At Illinois, he directed both NCSA and the National Computational Science Alliance, a nationwide partnership of more than 50 institutions to advance scientific discovery via high-performance computing. Reed was a principal investigator for the National Science Foundation's TeraGrid project, an effort to build and deploy the world's largest, most comprehensive computing system for open scientific research.

Reed is a member of President Bush's Information Technology Advisory Committee, charged with providing advice on information technology issues and challenges to the president, a member of the Biomedical Informatics Expert Panel for the National Institute of Health's National Center for Research Resources and a board member for the Computing Research Association, which represents the interests of the major academic departments and industrial research laboratories.

He testified before the U.S. House of Representatives Science Committee May 13 with White House Science Adviser John Marburger about the High-Performance Revitalization Act of 2004, the authorizing legislation for most U.S. civilian computing research. He chairs the policy board for the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, the Department of Energy's high-performance computing center for scientific research.

Reed was assistant professor of computer science at Carolina in 1983-84. He joined Illinois in 1984 and headed its computer science department, one of the nation's best, from 1996 to 2001. In 2001, Illinois named Reed to the Edward William and Jane Marr Gutgsell Professorship.