Biography
Ian Gorton is a professor of the practice and the director of mobility programs in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University, based in Seattle.
Gorton is passionate about analyzing and designing complex, high-performance distributed systems, and strives to instill design and architecture principles in methods and tools that can be exploited by architects for other projects. Before joining Northeastern in 2015, he was a senior member of the technical staff at the Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute. There, he designed massively scalable software architectures for big data applications and built knowledge bases — both manually and using machine learning — to support engineering tasks.
Before that, Gorton was a laboratory fellow in computational sciences and math at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL). He managed PNNL's Data Intensive Scientific Computing research group and was the chief architect for the lab's Data Intensive Computing Initiative. He was also a principal investigator for multiple projects in environmental modeling, carbon capture and sequestration, and bioinformatics. This experience has led to his interest in the design of large-scale, highly customizable cyber-infrastructures for scientific research.
Gorton is a senior member of the IEEE Computer Society and a Fellow of the Australian Computer Society. Until July 2006, he led software architecture R&D at National ICT Australia in Sydney, and previously worked at CSIRO, IBM, Microsoft, and in academia in Australia.
