Ralph Roskies Appointed to National Library of Medicine Board of Regents

Pitt professor of physics Ralph Roskies, scientific codirector of the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) since 1986, has been appointed to the National Library of Medicine’s Board of Regents. The appointment, for a four-year term, was made by Kathleen Sebelius, U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services.

Ralph Roskies

In 1984, Roskies, together with Professor Michael Levine of Carnegie Mellon University and James Kasdorf, then facilities manager of Westinghouse Electric Co., developed the proposal, submitted to the National Science Foundation, for what eventually became the PSC. Roskies is the author of more than 60 papers on theoretical elementary particle physics.

The PSC—a joint effort of Pitt, CMU, and Westinghouse— performs work that is pertinent to the National Library of Medicine, including the development of file systems, large-scale data storage, and wide-area networking.

At PSC, Roskies was principal investigator of the National Resource for Biomedical Supercomputing, the first external biomedical supercomputing program funded by the National Institutes of Health.

The National Resource for Biomedical Supercomputing, a part of PSC, has developed software tools used with the National Library of Medicine’s Visible Human project, which enhances anatomy training through innovative, interactive viewing. The National Resource for Biomedical Supercomputing’s volumetric visualization software also enables researchers to view and analyze the extremely large datasets obtained from light and electron microscopes and CAT and MRI scanners.

In other work related to the National Library of Medicine’s mission, the National Resource for Biomedical Supercomputing conducts research and training in bioinformatics. It also led innovative early work using high-speed networks to link an MRI scanner with a supercomputer to produce, almost instantaneously, an animated 3-D image of brain activity.

Part of the National Institutes of Health, the National Library of Medicine, located in Bethesda, Md., is the world’s largest biomedical library. As a developer of electronic information services, it delivers trillions of bytes of data to millions of users every day.