We are very pleased to announce that Ken Lutz has been named the Chief Research Technology Officer (CRTO) for the campus. This is a new role, intended to elevate the strategic importance of computing infrastructure to the campus research enterprise. As CRTO, Ken will be responsible for working strategically with campus leadership across research, IT, teaching and administration, to advance solutions to ensure a robust campus computational research infrastructure that supports the evolving needs of our campus’ cutting edge research and teaching.
Ken will also continue in his role as Director of Research IT within Research, Teaching, and Learning (RTL). In both roles, Ken will report to the campus Chief Academic Technology Officer within the Division of Undergraduate Education, and to the Vice Chancellor for Research.
Ken received a BSEE degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of California, Davis, and served as technical staff leader at UC Berkeley on the Symbolic Processing using RISCs (SPUR), Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks (RAID), Network of Workstations (NOW), and Infopad projects for 13 years. In 1998 Ken took a leave from the university to become Director of Technical Operations at Inktomi where he was in charge of the architecture, design and operation of the Inktomi worldwide search engine infrastructure. Upon returning to the University he went on to serve as Executive Director of the Gigascale Systems Research Center (GSRC) followed by serving as Executive Director of the Multiscale Systems Research Center (MuSyC) and the TerraSwarm research center, a series of nationwide, multi-university research efforts sponsored by the Focus Center Research Program (FCRP).
In addition to his CRTO and RTL roles, Ken serves as a Technical Director in the Berkeley Wireless Research Center. His current interests include the design and implementation of the Global Data Plane, a secure data communications and storage infrastructure.
We look forward to Ken’s leadership and insights to advance our research and teaching mission.