Bio: Abani K. Patra obtained a Ph.D. in Computational and Applied Mathematics from the University of Texas-Austin in 1995. After a short post-doctoral stint he joined the University at Buffalo, Mechanical and Aerospace department in 1996 and was promoted to full professor in 2004. He has been actively engaged in computational science research and was among the founding members of the Centers for Computational Research and the Center for Geohazards at Buffalo. He has published numerous articles on topics ranging from adaptive meshing and error analysis of finite elements, HPC and more recently large scale data driven methodologies. The TITAN2D toolkit, developed by Patra and co-workers, is used by over 200 groups worldwide for mass flow hazard analysis. He spent three years at the National Science Foundation as a program director in the Office of Cyberinfrastructure from 2007-10. Most recently Patra has led the development of a new PhD program in Computational Data Enabled Science and Engineering at Buffalo.