Brian Unger - A Brief Biography

Dr. Unger is currently Professor Emeritus and the Executive Director of the Grid Research Centre (grid.ucalgary.ca) at the University of Calgary and a Special Advisor for iReach ("informatics for rural empowerment and community health"), a research project supported by the International Development Research Centre of Canada (IDRC), and by the Cambodian Ministry of Commerce (ireach.org.kh). He was the founding president and CEO of iCORE (the “informatics circle of research excellence”) from 1999 through 2004, (www.icore.ca),a not-for-profit corporation aimed at recruiting exceptional ICT researchers to Alberta universities.

In its first five years iCORE invested $43 million in 17 research chairs and professorships that now support over 500 faculty, graduate students and research staff. Dr. Unger was the founding president of the Netera Alliance, now called Cybera Inc. (www.cybera.ca), a consortium that builds cyberinfrastructure to support research in Alberta, and was the founding board chair of C3.ca Inc. (www.c3.ca), a national consortium aimed at building Canada’s infrastructure in high performance computation. He is a Co-Principal Investigator of WestGrid (www.westgrid.ca),2002-2008, which raised $48 million to provide research infrastructure for Western Canada universities; and was the founding president and CEO of a for-profit startup company, Jade Simulations, that developed and marketed parallel simulation software products from 1988 through 1993.

Dr. Unger was named a Canada Pioneer of Computing at the IBM CASCON conference, Toronto, October, 2005, and received the IWAY Public Leadership award for outstanding contributions to Canada’s information society in 2004, and the 1993 ASTech award for “Innovation in Alberta Technology” for research in parallel simulation and distributed computation.