It’s a big month for good news in the “Triangle” region of North Carolina whether you are a fan of college basketball or computational science. The Raleigh News & Observer (N&O) has published a “Tar Heel of the Week” feature since January 19, 1950. In that time 2,500 North Carolinians have been named “Tar Heel of the Week.” Honorees have included politicians, business leaders, teachers, athletes, and activists. This week Dr. Robert Panoff, founder and director of the Durham educational foundation, Shodor, and PI of the NSDL Computational Science Education Resources Pathway, joined the ranks of N&O superlative tar heels for championing the idea “that to get better math and science students you need to teach their teachers.” Panoff said, “My goal was not to cure cancer but to do what I could for science education.”

Dr. Robert M. Panoff is the founder and executive director, Shodor Education Foundation in Durham since 1994. He also serves as consultant for the education program at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Panoff latest endeavor is to make sure that students are prepared to participate in sustained petascale computing by participating in the Blue Waters Project. Blue Waters will provide a computational system capable of sustained petaflop performance on a range of science and engineering applications. The project also includes intense support for application development and system software development, interactions with business and industry, and educational programs such as Shodor.

Read the N&O article here: http://www.newsobserver.com/166/story/1472490.html.