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Feature Story | Mathematics and Computer Science

Charlie Catlett named to Crain’s Tech 50 List

Charlie Catlett, a senior computer scientist in Argonne’s Mathematics and Computer Science Division, has been listed in Crain’s Tech 50 for 2014.

The annual list includes people from research laboratories, academia, industry – from entrepreneurs to techies – those who are shaping Chicago’s technology digital scene.”

Applying advanced technologies, from computing to data analytics to sensors, has long been a source of fascination to me,” said Catlett. How do we connect these resources effectively, how can we ensure their security, and how can we leverage new sources of data from public and private sources to better understand cities in order to guide policy decisions and urban development?”

Catlett is director of the Urban Center for Computation and Data (Urban CCD), which seeks to provide tools and methods for integrating and analyzing data from diverse sources (e.g., economics, health science, advanced computing) in order to transform the way cities are designed and operated.  One of the most exciting new initiatives of the Urban CCD is the Array of Things – a network of environmental sensors creating a fitness tracker” for Chicago, providing a better understanding of the city’s environment and its impact on livability.

A senior fellow in the Computation Institute and a Visiting Artist at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Catlett has had a rich career in technology. Formerly he served as Chief Information Officer and head of Argonne’s cyber security. He also served as director of the TeraGrid open science computing infrastructure.

Before joining Argonne in 2000, Catlett was Chief Technology Officer at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, helping deploy and manage the NSFNet. In the early 1990s he participated in the DARPA/NSF Gigabit Testbeds Initiative, coordinated by the Corporation for National Research Initiatives. Catlett also was the founding chair of the Global Grid Forum from 1999 through 2004, during which time he designed and deployed I-WIRE, one of the first regional optical networks dedicated to academic and research use.