Ian Bird
Ian Bird is currently Technical Director of the ESCAPE cluster project, working at LAPP-CNRS in France. From 2002 he was at CERN and took a lead role in setting up the computing environment for the analysis of LHC data – the LHC Computing Grid – a project that he then led and subsequently acted as spokesman for the WLCG collaboration from 2008 – 2020. The WLCG coordinates 170+ data centres in 40+ countries, transferring the LHC experiments’ data at a rate of 50GB/s, accessed by 12,000 physicists around the world.
At CERN he also had management responsibility within the IT Department for Scientific Computing activities.His background is as a particle physicist, and he spent 6 years at Jefferson Lab in the USA where he led the computing department and had responsibility for all aspects of computing for the laboratory, and served as computing expert for DoE and several US National Labs for scientific computing and cybersecurity.
Recently he has contributed to the design of large-scale distributed computing for the Square Kilometre Array and for the 3rd generation gravitational wave experiments, and as expert reviewer for many large scale scientific computing activities around the world in molecular biology as well as physics and astronomy.
