New Russian university loses vice president to US supercomputing center

Science : Edward Seidel spent less than a year at Russia’s new private university, the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology (Skoltech), as the senior vice president of research and innovation. He has now announced that he will be returning to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as the director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, where he had been a postdoc 20 years ago. At Skoltech, he had been responsible for establishing collaborations between the university and other institutions around the world. Seidel says that he thinks the project has made excellent progress and that Skoltech will be a success. He adds that the opportunity to return to the field of supercomputing was a significant basis for his decision. Seidel will begin his new position in January and will maintain a relationship with Skoltech as a consultant.