Jan E. Odegard Executive Director, Ken Kennedy Institute for Information Technology and Associate Vice President, Research Computing & Cyberinfrastructure at Rice University. Dr. Odegard joined Rice University in 2002, and has over 15 years of experience supporting and enabling research in computing, big-data and information technology.

As Executive Director of the Ken Kennedy Institute, Dr. Odegard co-leads the institute’s mission to engage the research community and more than 160 of Rice’s faculty members in developing strategic partnerships that leverage Rice’s strengths in information technology and computing to accelerate computational science and engineering research. Beyond the core he is also helping explore how information technology and computing can be leveraged into projects in non-traditional fields of scholarship. His proven track record in developing interdisciplinary projects and managing cyberinfrastructure serves as a as a catalyst for incubating cross-disciplinary research and collaboration. In partnership with colleagues in the energy industry he initiated the annual Oil & Gas High Performance Computing Conference series in 2008 at Rice University, which continues to draw more than 500 attendees each year and provides a number of computational and engineering related scholarships for Rice students.

As Associate Vice President for Research Computing and Cyberinfrastructure, Dr. Odegard leads the high-performance computing team at Rice’s Center for Research Computing that is charged with improving research cyberinfrastructure for the university’s campus community.
Before joining Rice in his current roles he was an associate professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Stavanger, Norway, and served as department chair in 2000-2001. In 1996-1997, he was executive director of the Computational Mathematics Laboratory and research associate in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rice, and from 1997 to 1999 he served as the founding executive director of the Rice Center for Multimedia Communication.

Odegard received the Michael Pearlman Memorial Service Award from Rice University in 2009. In 2002, he was elected as a Senior Member of IEEE. Dr. Odegard co-edited Rice's roadmap for information technology, “Information Science and Technology as a Universal Enabler.” He represents Rice in the Coalition for Academic Scientific Computation and helped organize a CASC/ EDUCAUSE joint workshop and coauthored its report, “Developing a Coherent Cyberinfrastructure from Local Campus to National Facilities: Challenges and Strategies.” He served as a member of the NSF-wide Advisory Committee for Cyberinfrastructure (ACCI) Campus Bridging Task Force and is a co-author of the ACCI Campus Bridging report.

Odegard received his Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering from Rice University in 1996. He earned a Bachelor of Science degree (1987) and a Master of Science degree (1990), both from Texas A&M University in electrical engineering. He also holds an associate degree (1986) in electrical engineering from Telemark College of Engineering, Porsgrunn, Norway.