Larry Smarr earned his B.S. (1970) and M.S. (1970) from the University of Missouri, a M.S. (1972) at Stanford University, and a Ph.D. (1975) from the University of Texas at Austin (all are in Physics). He then conducted postdoctoral research at Princeton, Yale, and Cambridge universities. For the three years before he joined the University of Illinois faculty in 1979, Smarr was a Junior Fellow in the Harvard University Society of Fellows.
An internationally recognized astrophysicist, Dr. Smarr has conducted observational, theoretical, and computational based research in relativistic astrophysics. In 1985, Dr. Smarr became the founding Director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In 1997, he became the founding Director of the National Computational Science Alliance, comprised of over fifty universities, government labs, and corporations linked with NCSA in a national-scale virtual enterprise to prototype the information infrastructure of the 21st century.
Dr. Smarr is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, as well as a member of the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee.
Information as of 1990