Initiative in Innovative Computing (IIC) Harvard University

Pavlos Protopapas earned his B.Sc. in physics at Imperial College in 1990 and received his Ph.D. in theoretical nuclear physics in 1996 from the University of Pennsylvania, where his thesis provided a solution to the Coriolis attenuation problem, an unsolved problem for over 40 years. He served as the associate director of the National Scalable Cluster Project collaboration, one of the initial attempts at large-scale distributed computing on a grid-like model. His major contribution at NSCP was the creation of the National Digital Mammography Archive . After the completion of the technology transfer for NDMA to IBM in 2001, he began working on large databases and data mining in astronomy. He is a member of the outer solar system team for Pan-STARRS and the data pipeline team on the TAOS project. At the IIC, he directs the work of an interdisciplinary team cataloging and finding interesting phenomena in what will become the largest collection of light curves in the world. He is the author of many refereed publications, ranging from nuclear physics to astronomy and computer science.