PNNL

Dr. Cowell, PhD, is the division director for Research Computing at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), a Department of Energy research laboratory in Washington State.

Dr. Cowell spent ten years as a senior research scientist at PNNL, leading projects for government sponsors in areas such as social media analytics, natural language processing, and human-computer interaction before leading the Data Sciences technical group (2012–2015) and the Visual Analytics technical group (2015–2017).

In 2017, he became director of the Research Computing Division. This division supports scientific inquiry by accelerating scientific outcomes through the development of computational platforms (e.g., high-performance computing, machine learning infrastructure, public cloud, scientific data management, etc.) for PNNL’s ~3,000 computationally enabled scientists. His team focuses on developing these architectures and supporting their adoption while building a strong computing culture at PNNL across the domains of energy, environment, Earth and biological systems, national security, and the physical sciences.

Before working at PNNL, Dr. Cowell worked for British Telecom Research Labs in Ipswich, England, and Eastman Kodak Research Labs in Rochester, New York.

He holds a PhD in industrial engineering from the University of Central Florida, an MSc in cognitive science from the University of Manchester, and a First-Class Honours Degree in computer science from the University of Bradford. He lives in Kennewick with his wife Amanda and two children, Taylor and Aiden.

• PhD, University of Central Florida, FL: Industrial Engineering
• MSc, University of Manchester, UK: Cognitive Science
• BSc, University of Bradford, UK: Computer Science (First-Class)