In this presentation, Dr. Aref will discuss some of the issues surrounding the management of our 'IT enterprise' on the campus, with a focus on providing computer support for students, faculty and staff. He will describe some of the changes that have taken place administratively and the agenda that he has set for the coming year. The audience will be encouraged to ask questions and a substantial portion of the allotted time will be devoted to a question and answer period.

Biography
Hassan Aref is Interim Chief Information Officer at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He was born in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1950. He received the cand. scient. degree from University of Copenhagen, Denmark, in 1975, and the Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1980, both degrees in physics. He became a US citizen in 1998.After completing graduate work and spending a summer as a postdoctoral fellow in the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics program at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Aref joined the Division of Engineering at Brown University as an assistant professor in 1980. In 1985, he moved to the University of California, San Diego, to a joint appointment in the Department of Applied Mechanics and Engineering Science, and the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics. He was promoted to Professor of Fluid Mechanics in 1988. Aref spent part of the 1985-86 academic year as a Visiting Professor of Applied Mathematics at the Technical University of Denmark. From 1989-92 he served as Chief Scientist of the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC). In 1992 he came to University of Illinois as Professor and Head of the Department of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics.

Aref's research efforts have concentrated on theoretical and computational fluid dynamics. He has published over 60 scientific papers and directed 15 masters and doctoral theses. His research has been supported by grants from various US federal agencies, primarily NSF, DoE, DARPA, and ONR. He has lectured widely in the US and around the world. Aref has had a longstanding interest in computers and education.

Aref's honors include a Presidential Young Investigator Award from National Science Foundation in 1985. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society, and a Foreign Member of the Danish Centre for Applied Mathematics and Mechanics. He was the 1988 Stanley Corrsin Lecturer at The Johns Hopkins University, and the 1991 Westinghouse Distinguished Lecturer at University of Michigan. In 1991, shortly before joining UIUC, he was a lecturer in the Midwest Mechanics Seminar, which each year brings four speakers to nine campuses in the Midwest.