Michael Mascagni

One of the first to use random number-based algorithms on the massively parallel Connection Machine at the Naval Research Lab in Washington, DC, Mascagni's family moved from Bologna, Italy 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, Mascagni 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 that his research moved to studying the high-performance computing implications of the algorithms he developed and used, and he was among the first to use random number-based algorithms on the massively parallel Connection Machine at the Naval Research Lab in DC.

After two years at NIH, Mascagni moved to the Institute for Defense Analyses' Supercomputing Research Center in Bowie, MD. This organization worked 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, where he was subsequently promoted to Full Professor. Mascagni has served on the editorial board of three journals in his field and has been 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 has also served as a member of the Board of Directors of IMACS.

He produced approximately 100 refereed technical papers that 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. Mascagni has served as 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 has worked as a consultant to industry and government. He has made technical presentations in 18 countries and in most of the 50 U.S. states.

His research group has consisted of post-doctoral associates, graduate students, and undergraduate workers. The areas they have worked on include 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.