CSC News
Vouk Receives 2013 MCNC Robyn Render Endeavor Award
Dr. Mladen Vouk, professor and head of the Department of Computer Science and associate vice provost for information technology at North Carolina State University, is this year’s recipient of the MCNC Robyn Render Endeavor Award.The award is presented each year to at least one person who continually champions leadership, engagement and support of MCNC, the technology nonprofit that builds, owns, and operates the North Carolina Research and Education Network (NCREN). NCREN links the majority of North Carolina’s research, education, nonprofit health care, and other community institutions. The network serves the needs of more than 450 of these institutions including all K-20 public education in North Carolina. It is the most prestigious award presented for contributions to NCREN.
“We are thrilled to be able to present this to Dr. Vouk,” said Mark Johnson, MCNC’s CTO and vice president of data architecture. “He exemplifies all the qualities we look for and thank him for his service.”
The award was announced at the NCREN Community Day held at NC State’s James B. Hunt Jr. Library Nov. 21-22. Dr. Louis A. Martin-Vega, dean of the College of Engineering at NC State, accepted the award on Vouk’s behalf.
Vouk is the fifth winner of the award with NC State ties, joining, Sam Averitt in 2006, Henry Schaffer in 2008 and John Streck and Phil Emer in 2009.
Each year, the NCREN Community Day planning team and community members consider the contributions of community members over an extended period of time.
“This year we determined it was time to reward Dr. Vouk for consistently challenging us to imagine a vision of the future to make it a reality,” Johnson said.
Fourteen years ago, Vouk’s work on high-quality video over the Internet directly led to MCNC deploying that technology for all production video conferencing and more recently for NC State’s Virtual Computing Laboratory (VCL) system, a cloud computing program in which Vouk co-founded. The VCL allows students and faculty remote access to a wide range of software, serving users throughout North Carolina and universities across the country.
Vouk received his PhD from King’s College, University of London. He has extensive experience in commercial software production and academic computing and is the author or co-author of more than 300 publications.
His research and development interests include software engineering, scientific computing and analytics, information technology-assisted education, and high-performance computing and clouds. He is also interested in the interdisciplinary research of coding theory and its use in communications and biology.
An Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Fellow, Vouk has taught courses and tutorials in cloud computing, scientific workflow management, software engineering, software testing, software reliability and fault-tolerance, software process and risk management, among other topics. He joined the faculty at NC State in 1985.
-Kucharczyk-
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