Brief Biography of Dr. Michael Mascagni |
Michael Mascagni was born in Bologna, Italy of one American and one Italian parent. However, by the age of four he was in the US confusing his Lake Forest, Illinois kindergarten teacher (and American grandmother) by correctly answering her Italian. This confusion continued though High School in Clinton, Iowa and College at the University of Iowa. At Iowa, he obtained a B.S.E. in Biomedical Engineering, and a B.S. in Mathematics and was a member of Phi Beta Kappa and Tau Beta Pi, the top liberal arts and engineering academic honor societies.
After graduation, he seriously considered going to Medical School, and declined two such offers to instead study Neurobiology at the Rockefeller University, which is located on the East River the middle of Manhattan. Since "the Rock" is such a small and specialized University, he also took graduate classes uptown, at Columbia University, and downtown, at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of New York University. Eventually, downtown trumped midtown and uptown, and Mathematics trumped Neurobiology, and he obtained his M.S. and Ph.D. in Mathematics from Courant. Perhaps more importantly, his social contacts at "the Rock" introduced him to his future wife, Becky Fandrei, at a party during an historic snow storm in New York. They were married between the Masters and Doctoral degrees.
Upon graduation, he obtained a post-doctoral
research position in the Mathematical
Research Branch of an institute of the National Institutes of Health, in
Bethesda, MD and they moved to Washington, DC. It was during
this period his research moved away from modeling the nervous
system to studying the high-performance computing implications of
the algorithms he developed and used. He was one of the
first to use random number-based algorithms on the massively
parallel Connection Machine at the Naval Research Lab in
DC. In fact, after two years at NIH he moved to the Institute for Defense Analyses' Supercomputing Research Center
in Bowie, MD. This organization works for the National Security Agency, and it
was here that his interests in parallel computing, random number
generation, number theory, and discrete mathematics were
nurtured. During his time at SRC his oldest sons Alexander
and Marcus were born, and are now both Eagle Scouts.
After many happy years at SRC, he decided to rejoin
academia, and went to the University
of Southern Mississippi to run the Graduate Program in Scientific
Computing. After a few years there, a desire to join a
Computer Science department arose, and he moved to Florida State University as an
Associate Professor of Computer
Science, he has since been promoted to Full Professor.
While at FSU his youngest son, Evan, was born. At FSU he
also has appointments as Professor of Mathematics,
Professor of Scientific Computing,
and a faculty member of the Graduate
Program in Molecular Biophysics.
Dr. Mascagni is on the editorial board of three
journals in his field, and is a member of the ACM (Association of Computing
Machinery), SIAM (Society of
Applied Mathematics), the Swiss Speedup
Society and IMACS
(International Association of Mathematics and Computers in
Simulation). He is also an ACM Distinguished Scientist and a
member of the Board of Directors of IMACS. He has
approximately 130 refereed technical papers that have appeared in
a wide variety of publications in areas including Applied
Mathematics, Computer Science, Simulation Science, Monte Carlo
Methods, Computational Science, High-Performance Computing,
Scientific Computing, Computational Physics, and Computational
Neuroscience. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Padova in Italy,
the University of Salzburg in
Austria, the University of the
South-Toulon and Var in France, and the Swiss Federal Technical
Institute-Zürich in Switzerland, and is a consultant to
industries and governments across the globe. He has made
technical presentations in 25 countries and in most of the 50 U.S.
states. Most recently he has been made a Faculty Appointee
at the National Institute of Standards and
Technology in Maryland.
The areas of research that Dr. Mascagni's research team work on are parallel and distributed computing, Grid computing, Cloud computing, random number generation, Monte Carlo methods, computational number theory and discrete algorithms, and applications to materials science, biochemistry, electrostatics, and finance.
His hobbies include swimming and biking, which arise
from his misspent youth at NYU where he commuted by bicycle and
swam each day, and playing the violin. In fact, he has been
the concertmaster of the Big
Bend Community Orchestra in Tallahassee and on its Board of
Directors, and even its President and he has played with several
orchestras in places like Washington,
DC, Salzburg,
Austria and Zürich,
Switzerland. He is now also the President of The Artist Series, which
presents professional chamber music concerts to appreciative
audiences in the Florida Big Bend, and is first violin in Beethoven's Revenge, a
string quartet. He has also been an active adult leader in Troop 118 in Tallahassee, and Troop 684 in Zürich, Switzerland, and
has been to the International Scout
Centre in Kandersteg, Switzerland, and all of the North American BSA
High Adventure Bases on challenging treks involving
backpacking, canoeing, sailing, and snorkeling.
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