Dr. Alpern received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Cornell University in 1986. He has been a Research Staff Member in the Mathematical Sciences Department of the IBM Watson Research Center ever since. His research interests include Performance Programming, Visualization of Computation and Architecture, Theoretical Models of Hierarchical Memory and Parallelism, Distributed and Parallel Computing, Message Compression, Computational Linear Algebra, and Portable High Performance. He took a sabbatical assignment at Cornell Theory Center 1992 - 1993, and developed and taught a graduate level course in Performance Programming for the Computer Science Department of Columbia University in the Fall of 1994.