Dr. Mark Gardner is the Network Research Manager in the Office of IT. His work focuses on making the power of networked computing accessible to faculty, staff and students. He sees his role as a catalyst in helping members of the university community accomplish teaching, scholarship and research. And in his "copious spare time," he does a little research of his own.

Dr. Mark Gardner earned a BSc degree in Mechanical Engineering from Brigham Young University in 1986. He worked from 1986 to 1991 as an aerodynamicist designing centrifugal compressors and other components for jet engines at Allied-Signal Aerospace, Garrett Auxiliary Power division, Phoenix AZ. His interest in computational fluid dynamics led him to obtain a MSc degree in Computer Science from Brigham Young University in 1994 where he became fascinated with (and distracted by) operating systems, compilers and other system software. He obtained a PhD in Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1999.

From 1999-2006, Mark worked as a technical staff member at Los Alamos National Laboratory on the RADIANT team (Research and Development In Advanced Network Technologies) in the Computer and Computational Sciences division. However, he found the invitation to work at Virginia Tech irresistible and is assisting to make the high-performance computing and networking opportunities at the university accessible to faculty, staff and students in his capacity as Network Research Manager in the Office of IT.

Mark's areas of research interest include system hardware and software, power-efficient computing, operating systems, compilers, programming languages, parallel programming, virtual computing... His main regret is that there are not enough hours in a day to truly become a renaissance man.