Directors

Jason Liu is an Eminent Scholar Chaired Professor at the Knight Foundation School of Computing and Information Sciences, Florida International University (FIU) in Miami, Florida, USA.  Previously, he was a Research Scientist at Dartmouth ISTS in 2003, a Postdoctoral Researcher at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign during 2003-2004. He held a honorary position as Visiting Professor at Tsinghua University, China, and was a Visiting Scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and Université Pierre et Marie Curie (UPMC)/Laboratory of Information, Networking and Communication Sciences (LINCS). Jason Liu received a B.S. degree from Beijing University of Technology in China in 1993, an M.S. degree from College of William and Mary in 2000, and a Ph.D. degree from Dartmouth College in 2003.

Jason Liu’s research focuses on modeling and simulation, parallel discrete-event simulation, performance modeling and simulation of computer systems and computer networks. He currently serves on the Editorial Board of ACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation (TOMACS), SIMULATION, Transactions of the Society for Modeling and Simulation International, and IEEE Networking Letters. He is also on the Steering Committee of ACM SIGSIM Conference on Principles of Advanced Discrete Simulation (SIGSIM-PADS). He served as General Chair or Program Chair for several conferences in related areas. Jason Liu is an NSF CAREER awardee in 2006 and an ACM Distinguished Scientist in 2014. His research has been supported by various funding agencies, including NSF, DOE, DOD, DHS, and NIH.

Dr. Trevor Cickovski received his Ph.D. from the University of Notre Dame in 2008. He holds Graduate Faculty status and specializes in teaching hardware and Unix coursework, and is IRB-certified and a member of the Bioinformatics Research Group (BioRG) at FIU. He also is a member of the ACM, IEEE, and the National Learning Assistant Alliance (LAA).

Before coming to FIU Trevor was Discipline Coordinator of Computer Science at Eckerd College, instructing a variety of computer science and cross-disciplinary liberal arts courses. He has received three teaching excellence awards, from the FIU College of Engineering (2019), FIU Knight Foundation School of Computing and Information Sciences (2017), and from Notre Dame as a graduate instructor (2006). Trevor was named a Center for the Advancement of Teaching (CAT) fellow in 2019, participating in a University-wide effort to improve teaching evaluation and developing a website for CAT referenced in Panther180. He has received funding from Nvidia to bring GPU computing to the classroom.

Trevor is passionate about health and explores roles played the microbiome in maintaining homeostasis. Microbiomes have enormous influence given their ubiquity and involvement in host metabolic reactions. He has explored connections with ADHD, A1AD, COPD, smoking, and red tides using multi-omics approaches that integrate DNA, RNA and metabolites through large-scale processing, GPUs, and network analyses. He has several peer-reviewed publications including JMM, LNBI, Bioinformatics, BMC, ICCABS, IWBBIO, and ACM TCBB. He has received funding from NIJ (epigenetics), and NSF (machine learning and Covid-19 vaccine discovery). Trevor is lead software developer of PluMA, facilitating natural progress by allowing construction of new ideas as plugins in a choice programming language. These can be uniformly tested alongside other plugins and committed to a centralized plugin pool. The PluMA plugin pool has grown from 70 to 225+ plugins from 2019 to 2020, and continues to grow.