NSU Horizons Fall 2011

Before computers were everywhere, Donald Lemma ’s high school had a PDP-8, one of the first successful minicomputers. That was back in the 1970s, and Lemma, always interested in science and electronics growing up in New Jersey, would program night and day. “I just fell in love with it.” Years later, he was drawn to Nova Southeastern University for his doctoral degree in computer information systems because he wanted to pursue it without interrupting the career he had spent 15 years developing. NSU’s program allowed him to go to Florida one week out of every twelve while still working as chief informa- tion officer for a biopharmaceutical firm in New Jersey. He received his degree in 1999 from NSU’s Graduate School of Computer and Information Sciences (GSCIS). Last year, Lemma, Ph.D., was named CIO and director of computing for the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Menlo Park, California, operated for the U.S. Department of Energy by Stanford University. “Without my Ph.D. from NSU, I doubt that I would have gotten the job, since the credentials of a Ph.D. are valued in both academic and scientific environments,” he said. “NSU was a perfect fit for my needs. It provided me with the resources I needed to further my education in the computing arena, gave me the ability to network with peers who were in the Ph.D. program, and allowed me to continue my full-time employment as a CIO while completing the degree requirements.” SLAC, one of 17 U.S. National Laboratories, has a rich history of contribution to both science and computing. Research at SLAC has lead to six Nobel Prizes. Formed 48 years ago with a mission to research high-energy physics, “the lab is responsible for the discovery of many of the subatomic particles that we know today,” Lemma said. Running across the hills above the Stanford campus, its two-mile-long linear accelerator is the longest in the world. “Every aspect of the science that we do involves high- performance computing being embedded in the work, ranging from viewing proteins at the molecular level to processing data from the orbiting Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope,” he said. “Our latest breakthrough, the X-ray laser, produces an X-ray that is one billion times more powerful than any X-ray ever produced by man. It can capture image data at a quadrillionth of a second at a resolution at the atomic scale.” The advances activated while he’s been at SLAC are myriad. “Some computing tools that came out of this effort at SLAC included the world’s first Internet application, the invention of instant messaging, the Web search engine, and the world’s first Web browser. We currently maintain the largest scientific database in the world.” Lemma’s dissertation at NSU was entitled “A theoretical model of a prescription drug public key encryption system.” It explored options for sending and authenticating prescriptions. In a simple example, Lemma said, a physician could send a prescription to a pharmacist to avoid having a prescription 36 horizons alumni profile From High-Speed Computers to High Adventure By Kay Mills Donald Lemma, with the Atomic and Molecular Optical Instrument, is CIO and director of computing for the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.