James Cuff on Computing’s Evolution and the Next Fascinating Challenge

April 26, 2022

James Cuff summarizes his career over the past 25 years or so in the latest episode of Bio-IT World’s Trends from the Trenches podcast. He tells our host, BioTeam’s Stan Gloss, where he’s seen updates in the space and which things have fundamentally stayed the same. He also shares about the problem that’s been bugging him for the past five years and the new company he’s joined that could fix it.

James Cuff, Chief of Scientific Computing and Partnerships, GigaIO
James brings deep insights from the world of advanced computing following over twenty five years working in what he calls “practical supercomputing”. James initially built the computing infrastructure, and supported the teams who annotated the human genome at the Welcome Trust Sanger Institute and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.

Over the last decade, as Assistant Dean & Distinguished Engineer at Harvard, James built an internationally recognized research computing organization from scratch. During his tenure, he was responsible for green high performance computing data centers, peta-scale parallel storage systems, low-latency highly performant networks, and sophisticated fully integrated computing platforms. He led a large team of scientists and research computing experts to support and deliver computing to drive our world’s most complex and advanced scientific research forward.

James joined GigaIO as Chief of Scientific Computing and Partnerships in March of 2022 to further define, build and enhance the scientific strategy for their current, and next generation high performance composable computing platforms and services. James holds a degree in Chemistry from Manchester University and a doctorate in Molecular Biophysics with a focus on neural networks and protein structure prediction from Oxford University.

Host Bio

Stan Gloss

As co-founder and Evangelist of BioTeam, Stan Gloss has been working to tell the stories of the intersection of science, data and technology since 2002. Gloss joined with fellow founding partners Bill Van Etten and Chris Dagdigian to form BioTeam in 2002 following his tenure in business development with AVAKI Corporation, a pioneer in global grid software solutions, and Blackstone Computing, a computing and IT consulting company for scientists, Gloss led the sales initiative that launched the company in the life sciences market. Gloss earned his MS at the University of Buffalo and was a department chairman and faculty member at Quinnipiac University.

A life science IT consulting firm at the intersection of science, data, and technology, BioTeam builds innovative scientific data ecosystems that close the gap between what scientists want to do with data—and what they can do. Learn more at www.bioteam.net.