Bill Courtright is the Executive Director of Carnegie Mellon University’s Parallel Data Laboratory (PDL), a multi-disciplinary academic research organization with strong ties to industry and government partners, a position he has held since 2004. In this role he is responsible for the day-to-day operations of the lab, including technical and administrative staff, financial management, and facilities including an HPC data center, known as the Data Center Observatory (DCO).

Bill also served as an adjunct professor in the Tepper School of Business from 2007-2015, teaching interdisciplinary courses in entrepreneurship and mentoring early stage companies. He co-taught a variety of executive education programs through 2020, in the areas of data centers, cloud computing and reliable computing systems.

Prior to joining the PDL as its Executive Director, Bill’s career centered in industry. In 1999 he co-founded Panasas, a storage systems company. He served as the company’s COO for the first two years of operation, responsible for product development, financial management, shareholder relations and human resources. As the company matured, Dr. Courtright focused his efforts on program management and intellectual property management.

Bill received his BS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Kansas in 1986 and joined NCR’s Storage Systems Division from 1986-1992, working on both ASIC and board-level storage products. He was the lead design engineer for five hardware products, including one component of industry’s first RAID chipset. During this period he also led the overhaul of the CAE environment, and earned an MS in Computer Engineering from the National Technological University.

From 1993-1995, Bill took a sponsored academic leave and attended Carnegie Mellon University to pursue a PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering, which he was awarded in 1997. His work on the use of transactional mechanisms in the design and implementation of redundant disk array software led to the production of RAIDframe, a RAID implementation that was adopted for use in numerous production and research applications, including NetBSD.

In 1996, Bill returned to industry, holding a variety of responsibilities, including strategic marketing, business development, intellectual property management, and storage systems architecture. He played a significant role in the development of the architecture and implementation of a next-generation storage management system. He is a co-inventor of nine patents in the field of storage systems and is a senior member of the IEEE.