Alan Chalker

Alan Chalker, Ph.D., is a program director at the Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC), where he leads OSC’s Blue Collar Computing industry outreach program. He also coordinates the preparation and submission of the center’s grant proposals and manages a variety of smaller research projects.

Additional responsibilities include helping to plan, coordinate and staff OSC’s appearance at the annual supercomputing conference and being project group leader for OSC’s Summer Institute program for high school students, of which he is an alumnus.

Chalker served as assistant academic lead for the Department of Defense’s (DoD) High Performance Computing Modernization Program in the areas of Integrated Modeling & Test Environments and Signal & Image Processing. In this role, he helped design and provide several training courses for DoD user groups on topics such as MATLAB, Python, FPGAs and Perl. He also coordinated a small team of researchers at OSC that worked on DoD projects involving technologies, such as parallel high-level languages, data sharing and mining and SIP algorithm parallelization.

In 2006, Chalker won the semiannual MATLAB programming contest, which is held by the Mathworks and involves dozens of MATLAB expert programmers from around the world competing against each other over a week-long period.

Prior to OSC, Chalker spent five years as the lead controls engineer with a public company, Embrex Inc. At Embrex, he worked on a research and development project developing an automated chicken gender determination process, receiving three federal patents.

In 1998, Chalker earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical and computer engineering from The Ohio State University. He received a doctoral degree in biomedical engineering at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2005.

Areas of Expertise
Blue Collar Computing
Signal & image processing
MATLAB
Industrial & laboratory
Automation patent application process
Project management