Stanley C. Ahalt

Stanley C. Ahalt is the Inaugural Dean of the UNC School of Data Science and Society (SDSS) and a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He also serves as Executive Adviser and Domain Scientist for Team Science at the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) and as Associate Director of Informatics and Data Science in the North Carolina Translational and Clinical Sciences Institute (NC TraCS).

• Education: Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering, Clemson University (1986)

Ahalt has over 30 years of experience in data science, with a focus on signal, image, and video processing, high-performance computing, and pattern recognition. His work bridges scientific computing and industrial applications, particularly in national security and domain-specific languages. He has fostered interdisciplinary collaborations across UNC’s School of Medicine, Information and Library Sciences, and with Duke University and North Carolina State University.

At UNC, Ahalt developed foundational partnerships for RENCI, including programs like Blue Collar Computing (democratizing high-performance computing) and OSCnet (high-speed research networks). He previously served as Executive Director of the Ohio Supercomputer Center and Professor at The Ohio State University for 22 years.