Dan Reed becomes director
“The transition really began on the first business day of 2000. Larry Smarr walked into my office, closed the door, and said ‘We need to talk.’ At that point, I knew my life was about to change in a dramatic way,” said Dan Reed.
Reed already had a pretty darn good job when he became NCSA’s director some nine months after that first conversation. He was head of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s computer science department, a program consistently ranked among the top three in the nation. But the allure of running a center like NCSA was too strong.
“It’s a place where no notion in too outrageous to consider…where people believe anything can be done. You don’t get many chances like that in a lifetime,” Reed said.