Argonne National Laboratory

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Catlett named Chief Information Officer at Argonne
Charles E. Catlett has been named Chief Information Officer and director of the Computing and Information Systems Division at the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory.

Argonne National Laboratory has named Charlie Catlett Chief Information Officer and Division Director of Argonne’s Computing and Information Systems Division. He will assume these responsibilities effective May 1, 2007.

Catlett brings over two decades of information technology research, development, and management experience, most recently as Director of the National Science Foundation’s nation-wide TeraGrid initiative and principal investigator of the TeraGrid’s Grid Infrastructure Group, which is a distributed team that coordinates TeraGrid operations, planning, software integration, and architecture.

Catlett will continue to work with the TeraGrid project in a strategic advisory role and as chairman of the TeraGrid leadership forum. Dane Skow, Deputy Director of the TeraGrid’s Grid Infrastructure Group since 2005, will assume the role of principal investigator and director.

Catlett joined Argonne in 2000 as a Senior Fellow at the Computation Institute of the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory. He has served in a variety of advisory committees to national infrastructure programs including the Energy Sciences Network (ESnet), Internet2, and National LambdaRail.

“We are delighted to have Charlie on board. His technical and community-building skills will be a real asset to the leadership team at the laboratory,” said Robert Rosner, director, Argonne National Laboratory. ​“A key aspect of the laboratory’s strategic plan is a new initiative called the ​‘Digital Laboratory,’ that recognizes information technology as a catalyst to improving Argonne’s ability to do science. Charlie’s experience and skills will be essential in completing that initiative.”

In 1999 Catlett founded Global Grid Forum, now Open Grid Forum, the leading international standards body focused on distributed systems and ​“grid” middleware standards, developing the organization as general chairman during its first five years. From 1999-2004 Catlett also directed the I-WIRE optical network project, deploying dark fiber and transport infrastructure to interconnect ten locations in Illinois.

Prior to joining Argonne in 2000, Catlett was Chief Technology Officer at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), overseeing all IT services, research, development, and support for academic and commercial application users. As part of the team that established NCSA in 1985, Catlett was responsible for NCSA’s participation in creating NSFNET, which evolved into today’s Internet.