Sally E. Howe

Acting Director, National Coordination Office (NCO)

Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) Program

(July 1997 – December 1997)

Dr. Howe began her Government career in 1980 at NIST, where she worked in statistical computing and computational geometry, and from 1988 to 1992 was Chief of the Scientific Computing Environments Division.

In 1992 she joined the newly-established NCO/HPCC (National Coordination Office for High Performance Computing and Communication). She worked there and at its successor NCO/NITRD (NCO for Networking and Information Technology R&D) until 2007, including as Associate Director from 2001 to 2007. She was editor of the annual Supplements to the

President’s budget request to Congress for the HPCC and NITRD Programs, which are required by the High-Performance Computing Act of 1991. She coordinated HPCC technical activities and provided technical support to the PITAC (the President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee) and its PCAST (the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology) successor. She was responsible for the NCO budget and the NCO technical support contract.

From 2007 until her retirement in 2017, Dr. Howe was at NIH’s National Library of Medicine, where the NCO had been located from 1992 to 1995. At NLM she worked in the health effects of climate change and built the NCO/HPCC print archive and finding aid. The archive includes Congressional, HPCCIT (now NITRD) Subcommittee, PITAC and PCAST, NASA HPCC, and Coalition for Academic Supercomputing Centers (CASC) publications and reports. She wrote blog posts about HPCC and NITRD from the 1980s to 1992, 1992 to 1995, and 1996 to 2015.

Dr. Howe holds a B.A. in Mathematics from William Smith College, an M.A. in Mathematics from the University of Virginia, and a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from Brown University. She taught statistics at Carnegie-Mellon University.