Ron Brightwell received his BS in mathematics in 1991 and his MS in computer science in 1994 from Mississippi State University. He joined Sandia National Laboratories in 1995 after serving as a research assistant in the system software group at the MSU/NSF Engineering Research Center for Computational Field Simulation. While at Sandia, he has designed and developed high-performance implementations of the Message Passing Interface (MPI) standard on several large-scale, massively parallel computing platforms, including the Cray T3D and T3E, the Intel Paragon and TeraFLOPS (ASCI/Red), and Sandia's Computational Plant clusters. His research interests include high-performance, scalable communication interfaces and protocols for system area networks, operating systems for massively parallel processing machines, and parallel program performance analysis libraries and tools. He is also currently pursuing a PhD in the Department of Computer Science at the University of New Mexico.