Larry Smarr is the founding Institute Director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, which brings together over two hundred faculty from UCSD and UC Irvine with over fifty industrial partners to research the future development of the Internet. In 2002 he was named the Harry E. Gruber Professor of Computer Science and Information Technologies. Prior to accepting the posts in California, for two decades Dr. Smarr was on the faculty of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Departments of Physics and of Astronomy and conducted observational, theoretical, and computational based research in relativistic astrophysics, resulting in the publication of over seventy scientific papers. From 1985 to 2000 Smarr was the director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications.