History and organization
Key highlights of CIT are listed at the following link: http://www.nih.gov/about/almanac/organization/CIT.htm#events
Past Directors
| Portrait | Name | In office from | To |
|---|
 | Dr. Arnold W. Pratt | August 1966 | May 1990 |
 | Dr. David Rodbard | November 1990 | April 1996 |
| | William L. Risso (Acting) | April 1996 | March 1998 |
| | Alan S. Graeff | March 1998 | November 2005 |
 | Dr. John F. Jones, Jr. (Acting) | November 2005 | February 2011 |
| | Thomas G. Murphy (Acting) | February 2011 | October 2011 |
 | Andrea Norris | October 2011 | December 31, 2022 |
 | Ivor D'Souza (acting) | January 1, 2023 | Present |
Past NIH CIOs
In January 2008, in an effort to foster efficiencies, the Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO) was established in the NIH Office of the Director. The functions of the CIO, formerly part of NIH Center for Information Technology (CIT), were transferred from CIT to the new OCIO. OCIO develops IT-related strategy, services, and policy to ensure that all NIH IT infrastructure is benchmarked against industry standards. CIT functions as the operating arm of the CIO, providing IT expertise for OCIO program activities and providing enterprise IT services and research and administrative support to all of NIH.
The CIT Office of the Director (OD) plans, directs, coordinates, and evaluates the Center's programs, policies, and procedures and provides analysis and guidance in the development of systems for the use of IT techniques and equipment in support of NIH programs. The OD includes the Executive Office (EO), which provides CIT administrative and business management services in support of CIT programs. The EO provides oversight of CIT's administrative policies and procedures; provides financial management, including development and oversight of the CIT budget; advises on human resources planning and management; and performs strategic planning, operational planning, and performance measurement.
Office of the Director (OD)
Ivor D'Souza, Acting Director, CIT; Xavier Soosai, CIO and Director, IT Services; Kevin Davis, Director of Office of Administration Management [1]
Office of the IT Services Management
- CIO and Director of IT Services: Xavier Soosai, MS. MBA
The Office of CIO and IT Services Management [2] directs service areas that provide NIH with a variety of IT services such as user support, identity and access management, high-performance computing, and network cabling. The service areas are: Business Application Services; [3] Facilities and Infrastructure Support Services; [4] High Performance Computing Services; [5] Hosting and Storage Services; [6] Identity and Access Management Services; [7] IT Support Services; [8] Network Services; [9] Operations Management Services; [10] Service Desk Services; [11] and Unified Communication and Collaboration Services. [12]
Computing is any goal-oriented activity requiring, benefiting from, or creating computing machinery. It includes the study and experimentation of algorithmic processes, and development of both hardware and software. Computing has scientific, engineering, mathematical, technological and social aspects. Major computing disciplines include computer engineering, computer science, cybersecurity, data science, information systems, information technology and software engineering.
The National Institutes of Health, commonly referred to as NIH, is the primary agency of the United States government responsible for biomedical and public health research. It was founded in the late 1880s and is now part of the United States Department of Health and Human Services. Many NIH facilities are located in Bethesda, Maryland, and other nearby suburbs of the Washington metropolitan area, with other primary facilities in the Research Triangle Park in North Carolina and smaller satellite facilities located around the United States. The NIH conducts its own scientific research through the NIH Intramural Research Program (IRP) and provides major biomedical research funding to non-NIH research facilities through its Extramural Research Program.
Grid computing is the use of widely distributed computer resources to reach a common goal. A computing grid can be thought of as a distributed system with non-interactive workloads that involve many files. Grid computing is distinguished from conventional high-performance computing systems such as cluster computing in that grid computers have each node set to perform a different task/application. Grid computers also tend to be more heterogeneous and geographically dispersed than cluster computers. Although a single grid can be dedicated to a particular application, commonly a grid is used for a variety of purposes. Grids are often constructed with general-purpose grid middleware software libraries. Grid sizes can be quite large.
The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) is an agency of the United States Department of Commerce that serves as the President's principal adviser on telecommunications policies pertaining to the United States' economic and technological advancement and to regulation of the telecommunications industry.
The National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases (NIAMS) is one of the institutes and centers that make up the National Institutes of Health, an agency of the United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
Sirindhorn International Institute of Technology (SIIT) is a semi-autonomous institute of technology established in 1992 within Thammasat University. It is located in Pathum Thani, Thailand. One of Thailand's research universities, it offers science, technology and engineering education, as well as related management programs. All are international programs, with English language as a medium of instruction. The institute is part of the Links to Asia by Organizing Traineeship and Student Exchange network, an international consortium of universities in Europe and Asia.
E-Science or eScience is computationally intensive science that is carried out in highly distributed network environments, or science that uses immense data sets that require grid computing; the term sometimes includes technologies that enable distributed collaboration, such as the Access Grid. The term was created by John Taylor, the Director General of the United Kingdom's Office of Science and Technology in 1999 and was used to describe a large funding initiative starting in November 2000. E-science has been more broadly interpreted since then, as "the application of computer technology to the undertaking of modern scientific investigation, including the preparation, experimentation, data collection, results dissemination, and long-term storage and accessibility of all materials generated through the scientific process. These may include data modeling and analysis, electronic/digitized laboratory notebooks, raw and fitted data sets, manuscript production and draft versions, pre-prints, and print and/or electronic publications." In 2014, IEEE eScience Conference Series condensed the definition to "eScience promotes innovation in collaborative, computationally- or data-intensive research across all disciplines, throughout the research lifecycle" in one of the working definitions used by the organizers. E-science encompasses "what is often referred to as big data [which] has revolutionized science... [such as] the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN... [that] generates around 780 terabytes per year... highly data intensive modern fields of science...that generate large amounts of E-science data include: computational biology, bioinformatics, genomics" and the human digital footprint for the social sciences.
The Biocomplexity Institute of Virginia Tech is a research organization specializing in bioinformatics, computational biology, and systems biology. The institute has more than 250 personnel, including over 50 tenured and research faculty. Research at the institute involves collaboration in diverse disciplines such as mathematics, computer science, biology, plant pathology, biochemistry, systems biology, statistics, economics, synthetic biology and medicine. The institute develops -omic and bioinformatic tools and databases that can be applied to the study of human, animal and plant diseases as well as the discovery of new vaccine, drug and diagnostic targets.
TeraGrid was an e-Science grid computing infrastructure combining resources at eleven partner sites. The project started in 2001 and operated from 2004 through 2011.
Neuroinformatics is the field that combines informatics and neuroscience. Neuroinformatics is related with neuroscience data and information processing by artificial neural networks. There are three main directions where neuroinformatics has to be applied:
The Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA) is an American non-profit corporation that administers three federally funded research and development centers (FFRDCs) – the Systems and Analyses Center (SAC), the Science and Technology Policy Institute (STPI), and the Center for Communications and Computing (C&C) – to assist the United States government in addressing national security issues, particularly those requiring scientific and technical expertise. It is headquartered in Alexandria, Virginia.
The School of Engineering and Applied Science (SEAS) at the George Washington University in Washington, D.C. is a technical school which specializes in engineering, technology, communications, and transportation. The school is located on the main campus of the George Washington University and offers both undergraduate and graduate programs.
The National Center for Research Resources (NCRR) was a center within the National Institutes of Health a United States government agency. NCRR provided funding to laboratory scientists and researchers for facilities and tools in the goal of curing and treating diseases.
The National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB), founded at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 2000, is located in Bethesda, Maryland. It is one of 27 institutes and centers that are part of NIH, an agency of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
The Research Institute for Advanced Computer Science (RIACS) was founded June 1, 1983 as a joint collaboration between the Universities Space Research Association (USRA) and the NASA Ames Research Center. The Institute was created to conduct basic and applied research in computer science, covering a broad range of research topics of interest to the aerospace community including supercomputing, computational fluid dynamics, computational chemistry, high performance networking, and artificial intelligence.
The United States Department of Defense High Performance Computing Modernization Program (HPCMP) was initiated in 1992 in response to Congressional direction to modernize the Department of Defense (DoD) laboratories’ high performance computing capabilities. The HPCMP provides supercomputers, a national research network, high-end software tools, a secure environment, and computational science experts that together enable the Defense laboratories and test centers to conduct research, development, test and technology evaluation activities.
The New York City Office of Technology and Innovation (OTI), formerly known as the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications (DoITT), is the department of the government of New York City that "over[saw] the City's use of existing and emerging technologies in government operations, and its delivery of services to the public". Although the agency's primary purpose is to facilitate the technology needs of other New York City agencies, DoITT was best known by city residents for its 3-1-1 "citizens' hotline," established in 2003. Its regulations were compiled in title 67 of the New York City Rules.
John F. "Jack" Jones Jr. is currently the vice president and chief technology officer at WiseDesign. He previously served as chief information officer (CIO) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), an agency of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The NIH CIO advises the NIH director on strategic directions and management of information technology programs and policy. Jones also served as the director (acting) of the Center for Information Technology (CIT), at the NIH.
Katherine "Kathy" Anne Yelick, an American computer scientist, is the Vice Chancellor for Research and the Robert S. Pepper Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. She is also a faculty scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where she was Associate Laboratory Director for Computing Sciences from 2010-2019.
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