Dr. Jacob Barhen

Dr. Barhen currently serves as the director of ORNL's Center for Engineering Science Advanced Research (CESAR). He earned a MSc in 1975 and a DSc in 1978, both in nuclear engineering, from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. He is also known as the head of the Intelligent and Emerging Computational Systems Section in ORNL's Computer Science and Mathematics Division. In August 2000 he joined the Battelle Technology Council. He is also a non-resident affiliate of the California Institute of Technology's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (Caltech/JPL).

From 1987 to 1994, Dr. Barhen was the head of the Nonlinear Science and Information Processing Group at Caltech/JPL. From 1978 to 1987, he headed ORNL's Machine Intelligence Group. At both institutions, he established world-class research groups in artificial neural information processing and computational science. He has been the principal investigator of numerous basic and applied research projects funded by the Departments of Defense and Energy, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and other U.S. government agencies. He coordinated the formulation of the engineering science component of DOE's Office of Science nanotechnology program and is part of the national leadership team for the establishment of a Robotics and Intelligent Machines Initiative.

Dr. Barhen's research interests include global optimization, neural networks, intelligent systems, algorithms for hyperspectral remote sensing, computational methods for seismic imaging, and optical and quantum information processing. He has authored more than 150 scientific papers and serves on the editorial boards of Neural Networks, Neural Processing Letters, Mathematical and Computer Modeling, and Concurrency.