Roscoe Giles

Roscoe Giles is a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and a Founding Member of the Faculty of Computing and Data Sciences at Boston University (BU). He is currently focused on helping the AI/ML research and education communities to gain improved access to larger scale high performance computing systems.

Giles’ earlier research focused on high performance computing and computational science. This included the application of high performance and parallel computing to physics and materials problems ranging from quantum field theory to molecular dynamics to simulations of magnetic materials.

In addition, Giles has served in several high impact scientific leadership roles. He is a long time member of the DOE Advanced Scientific Computing Advisory Committee (ASCAC), and chaired that committee during the initiation of the successful Exascale Computing Project. He also served as a member and chair of the Board of Trustees of Associated Universities Inc (AUI), an international research management organization. At Boston University, he has chaired the Boston University Faculty Council and was the first council chair to serve on the university’s board of trustees. He has been recognized with the Computing Research Association’s A. Nico Habermann award and is a fellow of AAAS.

Professor Giles received his PhD in Physics from Stanford University in 1975 as a Hertz Fellow. He is the first in a long line of African-American PhDs in Physics and Applied Physics at Stanford. He received a Bachelor of Arts in Physics from the University of Chicago in 1970. He was interviewed for the History Makers’ Archive in 2012.