John Towns is Deputy CIO for Research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the Executive Director for Science & Technology at NCSA (the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, also at Illinois).  He is also PI and Project Director for the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) project and Director of the Illinois Campus Cluster Program. Towns plays significant roles in the deployment and operation of high-end resources and services, and distributed computing projects providing leadership and direction in the development and provisioning of advanced computing resources and services. His background is in computational astrophysics utilizing a variety of computational architectures with a focus on application performance analysis. He earned M.S. degrees in Physics and Astronomy from the University of Illinois and a B.S. in Physics from the University of Missouri-Rolla.