Wayne Pfeiffer, PhD
Wayne Pfeiffer is a distinguished scientist at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) doing research and development in bioinformatics. He has analyzed DNA sequence data to study human longevity and to characterize the bacteria that infect people and birds. He is also co-principal investigator on NSF and NIH grants to maintain and enhance the CIPRES science gateway, which has been used by more than 30,000 researchers around the world to infer phylogenetic trees using supercomputers. In addition, he is project manager for Gordon, a data-intensive supercomputer operated originally for NSF and currently for the Simons Foundation.
Previously Pfeiffer did research in supercomputer performance analysis. He was principal investigator for NSF- and DARPA-funded studies to evaluate the Tera MTA, a novel computer with a multithreaded architecture. He also co-led the Joint NSF-NASA Initiative on Evaluation of scalable parallel computers.
During the early years of his tenure at SDSC, Pfeiffer held various senior management positions. For several years he was Deputy Director of NPACI, an NSF-funded national partnership led by SDSC. In that capacity he coordinated operation and support of the computational resources within NPACI. In addition, he was Deputy Director at SDSC, responsible initially for the entire research program and subsequently for its technology components.
Before helping found SDSC, Pfeiffer worked at General Atomics as a computational physicist in fission and fusion energy research and development. He has a doctoral degree in engineering science from the California Institute of Technology and a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Wichita State University.