Dr. Robert M. Panoff is founder and Executive Director of The Shodor Education Foundation, Inc., and has been a consultant at several national laboratories. He is also a frequent presenter at NSF- sponsored workshops on visualization, supercomputing, and networking, and continues to serve as consultant for the education program at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has served on the advisory panel for Applications of Advanced Technology program at NSF. Dr. Panoff received his M.A. and Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Washington University in St. Louis, undertaking both pre- and postdoctoral work at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University.
As principal investigator on several NSF grants that seek to explore the interaction of high performance computing technologies and education, he worked to develop a series of interactive simulations which combine supercomputing resources and desktop computers. Besides developing and teaching a new course in Information Technologies, Dr. Panoff continues an active research program in computational condensed matter physics while defining and implementing educational initiatives at the Shodor Foundation.
At Kansas State University and Clemson University from 1986-1990, he developed a fully interdisciplinary computational science and engineering course. He served as director of the Carolinas Institute in Computational Science, an NSF-funded initiative in Undergraduate Faculty Enhancement, 1991-1993. His work has won several major science and education awards, including the 1990 Cray Gigaflop Performance Award in Supercomputing, the 1994 and 1995 Undergraduate Computational Science Education Awards from the U.S. Department of Energy, and a 1995 Achievement Award from the Chicago Chapter of the Society for Technical Communication. In 1993-1994, his interactive simulations were used as the basis of an international science collaboration demonstrating network technologies involving four of the schools from the Department of Defense Dependent Schools, for which he received a letter of commendation from the Department of Defense. In recognition of Dr. Panoff's efforts in undergraduate faculty enhancement and curriculum development, the Shodor Foundation was named in 1996 as a Foundation Partner of the National Science Foundation for the revitalization of undergraduate education. He has led the development of Interactivate and the National Computational Science Institute. In 2022 Dr Panoff received the inaugural SIGHPC Educational Award For Outstanding Contribution to Computational Science Education.
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