Professor Michael Mascagni

Born in Bologna, Italy of one American and one Italian parent, his family moved to Lake Forest, Illinois when he was four. He attended 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. 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, he obtained his M.S. and Ph.D. in Mathematics from Courant. 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 moved to Washington, DC. It was during this period his research moved 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. 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. He 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), and IMACS (International Association of Mathematics and Computers in Simulation). He is also a member of the Board of Directors of IMACS. He has approximately 100 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, and the Swiss Federal Technical Institute-Zürich in Switzerland, and is a consultant to industry and government. He has made technical presentations in 18 countries and in most of the 50 U.S. states. At present his research group consists of post-doctoral associates, graduate students, and undergraduate workers. The areas they work on are parallel and distributed computing, Grid computing, random number generation, Monte Carlo methods, computational number theory and discrete algorithms, and applications to materials science, biochemistry, electrostatics, and finance.