Ian Gorton is the director of computer science master’s programs and a professor of the practice at the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University’s Seattle campus. He is passionate about analyzing and designing complex, high-performance distributed systems and embodying design and architecture principles in methods and tools that can be exploited by architects in other projects.

Before joining Northeastern in 2015, he was a senior member of the technical staff at the Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute. He had several projects on the principles of designing massively scalable software architectures for big data applications and building knowledge bases both manually and using machine learning to support engineering tasks. Before this, Gorton was a laboratory fellow in computational sciences and math at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL). He managed the Data Intensive Scientific Computing research group and was the chief architect for PNNL’s Data Intensive Computing Initiative. He was also PI for multiple projects in environmental modeling, carbon capture and sequestration, and bioinformatics. This experience has led to a particular interest in the design of large-scale, highly customizable cyber-infrastructures for scientific research.