Hakizumwami Birali Runesha is the Assistant Vice President for Research Computing and Director of the Research Computing Center (RCC) at the University of Chicago. He holds a Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from Old Dominion University and has more than 18 years of experience in high performance computing and scientific software development. Prior to moving to Chicago, he was the Director of Scientific Computing and Applications at the University of Minnesota Supercomputing Institute, Research Associate at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology developing and Assistant Professor in the Civil Engineering Department at the University of Kinshasa. His research interests are in parallel computing, sparse numerical libraries, finite element analysis and design optimization in engineering.