Mallikarjun (Arjun) Shankar is a distinguished R&D staff scientist and acting director of the National Center for Computational Sciences division and the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He received his B.Tech. from the Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai, and his M.S. and Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. After his doctoral research, he worked in industry, designing and building next-generation content distribution infrastructures before joining ORNL in 2002.
Dr. Shankar’s research interests include large-scale data analysis and modeling systems, sensor networking systems, and energy grid monitoring and control frameworks. He created VERDE (Visualizing Energy Resources Dynamically on the Earth) in 2008, laying the foundation for the US Department of Energy’s and ORNL’s national electric grid monitoring system, the Environment for Analysis of Geo-Located Energy Information system. From 2012 to 2014, he led DOE’s inter-agency engagement with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and has been the director of ORNL’s Compute and Data Environment for Science from 2015 to 2022. He served as a member of the DOE Integrated Research Infrastructure Architecture Blueprint Activity leadership group. His research has resulted in over eighty peer-reviewed publications, including those that address jointly modeling and simulating systems coupled with observational data, incorporating policy constraints, and creating scalable cross-facility data infrastructure.
Before assuming the role of Acting Division Director, Dr. Shankar served as Section Head for Advanced Technologies in NCCS, where he oversaw four groups: Analytics and AI Methods at Scale, Data Lifecycle Technologies, Workflow and Ecosystem Services, and Technology Integration. From July 2022 to March 2023, he served as Interim Division Director for the Computer Science and Mathematics Division.