Jan F. Prins
Professor Emeritus
Ph.D. 1987, Cornell. High performance computing: parallel algorithms, programming languages, compilers, and architectures; scientific computing with focus on computational biology and bioinformatics.
Biography
Jan F. Prins is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He obtained his B.S. in 1978 in Mathematics from Syracuse University, M.S. in 1983 and Ph.D. in 1987 in Computer Science from Cornell University. His minor concentration was in Neurobiology. In 1976 he co-founded Digital Effects Inc., one of the first computer animation companies. Sample productions include portions of the film “TRON”. In 1978 he joined STSC, Inc., the leading worldwide APL timesharing services supplier, where he was a member of the APL development and implementation group. At Cornell he worked with Physics Nobel Laureate Kenneth Wilson and David Gries on the Gibbs language for scientific computing. In 1986 he was a research associate at the University of Wisconsin at Madison where he worked on the use of program slicing and merging for software version management. Since 1987, he has been on the computer science faculty at UNC-Chapel Hill, and is also a member of the bioinformatics and computational biology training program and the curriculum in molecular and cellular biophysics. He was a visiting professor at the Institute for Theoretical Computer Science at ETH Zurich, in the area of scientific computing. His research interests center on parallel computing, including algorithm design, computer architecture, and programming languages. His research has been sponsored by DoD (AFOSR, ARO, DARPA, NSA, ONR), DOE, EPA, NIH, and NSF, and by industry (IBM, Microsoft, and various HPC companies).