Welcome to the first Fresh Tracks Newsletter, highlighting news from the SCI Institute. 2012 was another exciting year, culminating in our second successful SCIx Open House. Hundreds of people took advantage of the event to learn more about SCI Institute research and hear SCIx keynote speaker Alan Kay, a Turing Award recipient give an enlightening and entertaining presentation. SCI Institute faculty garnered a number of prestigious research awards in 2012. Jeff Weiss received the Van Mow Medal, Miriah Meyer was named a Microsoft Faculty Fellow and a TED Fellow, Chuck Hansen was elected as an IEEE Fellow, and Valerio Pascucci was inducted as a DOE Fellow. Tolga Tasdizen received an NSF CAREER Award and the College of Engineering Distinguished Teaching Award. I was honored to receive the 2012 IEEE IPDPS Charles Babbage Award.

In this issue, we highlight a research collaboration between our NIH Center for Integrative Biomedical Computing (CIBC) and Dr. Christopher Butson of the University of Wisconsin. This collaboration emphasizes computational modeling, simulation and visualization of deep brain stimulation (DBS) planning, a therapy used in the treatment of movement disorders such as Parkinson's. Optimization of DBS electrodes is accomplished using our ImageVis3D Mobile software on an iPad.

In 2013, we welcome Dongbin Xiu as the 15th tenure-track faculty member within the SCI Institute. Dongbin, a Professor of Mathematics, is one of the most recognized names and highly cited researchers in the area of uncertainty quantification.

We hope you will join us for the 2013 SCI Institute Distinguished Lecture Series,on Fridays at 2:00 p.m. in the Evans Conference Room. If you can't attend, these Distinguished Lectures are available on the SCI TV section of our website. Details of all our upcoming seminars and lectures, along with an archive of previous seminars are available on our events page.

Fresh Tracks January 2013

Sincerely,

Chris R. Johnson, Ph.D.
Director,
Scientific Computing and Imaging (SCI) Institute
Distinguished Professor,
School of Computing
University of Utah