A Brief Biography of Dr. Michael Mascagni

Michael Mascagni was born in Bologna, Italy of one American and one Italian parent.  However, by the age of four he was in the US confusing his Lake Forest, Illinois kindergarten teacher (and American grandmother) by correctly answering her Italian.  This confusion continued though High School in Clinton, Iowa and College at the University of Iowa.  At Iowa, he obtained a B.S.E. in Biomedical Engineering, and a B.S. in Mathematics and was a member of Phi Beta Kappa and Tau Beta Pi, the top liberal arts and engineering academic honor societies.

After graduation, he seriously considered going to Medical School, and declined two such offers to instead study Neurobiology at the Rockefeller University, which is located on the East River the middle of Manhattan.  Since "the Rock" is such a small and specialized University, he also took graduate classes uptown, at Columbia University, and downtown, at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of New York University.  Eventually, downtown trumped midtown and uptown, and Mathematics trumped Neurobiology, and he obtained his M.S. and Ph.D. in Mathematics from Courant.  Perhaps more importantly, his social contacts at "the Rock" introduced him to his future wife, Becky Fandrei, at a party during an historic snow storm in New York.  They were married between the Masters and Doctoral degrees.

Upon graduation, he obtained a post-doctoral research position in the Mathematical Research Branch of an institute of the National Institutes of Health, in Bethesda, MD and they moved to Washington, DC.  It was during this period his research moved away from modeling the nervous system to studying the high-performance computing implications of the algorithms he developed and used.  He was one of the first to use random number-based algorithms on the massively parallel Connection Machine at the Naval Research Lab in DC.  In fact, after two years at NIH he moved to the Institute for Defense Analyses' Supercomputing Research Center in Bowie, MD.  This organization works for the National Security Agency, and it was here that his interests in parallel computing, random number generation, number theory, and discrete mathematics were nurtured.  During his time at SRC his oldest sons Alexander and Marcus were born, and are now both Eagle Scouts.

After many happy years at SRC, he decided to rejoin academia, and went to the University of Southern Mississippi to run the Graduate Program in Scientific Computing.  After a few years there, a desire to join a Computer Science department arose, and he moved to Florida State University as an Associate Professor of Computer Science, he has since been promoted to Full Professor.  While at FSU his youngest son, Evan, was born,

Dr. Mascagni is on the editorial board of three journals in his field, and is a member of the ACM (Association of Computing Machinery), SIAM (Society of Applied Mathematics), the Swiss Speedup Society and IMACS (International Association of Mathematics and Computers in Simulation).  He is also an ACM Distinguished Scientist and a member of the Board of Directors of IMACS.  He has approximately 120 refereed technical papers that have appeared in a wide variety of publications in areas including Applied Mathematics, Computer Science, Simulation Science, Monte Carlo Methods, Computational Science, High-Performance Computing, Scientific Computing, Computational Physics, and Computational Neuroscience.  He has been a visiting professor at the University of Padova in Italy, the University of Salzburg in Austria, the University of the South-Toulon and Var in France, and the Swiss Federal Technical Institute-Zürich in Switzerland, and is a consultant to industry and government.  He has made technical presentations in 25 countries and in most of the 50 U.S. states.

The areas of research that Dr. Mascagni's research team work on are parallel and distributed computing, Grid computing, Cloud computing, random number generation, Monte Carlo methods, computational number theory and discrete algorithms, and applications to materials science, biochemistry, electrostatics, and finance.

His hobbies include swimming and biking, which arise from his misspent youth at NYU where he commuted by bicycle and swam each day, and playing the violin.  In fact, he has been the concertmaster of the Big Bend Community Orchestra in Tallahassee and on its Board of Directors, and even its President and he has played with several orchestras in places like Washington, DC, Salzburg, Austria and Zürich, Switzerland. He is also the President of The Artist Series, which presents professional chamber music concerts to appreciative audiences in the Florida Big Bend, and is first violin in Beethoven's Revenge, a string quartet.  He has also been an active adult leader in Troop 118 in Tallahassee, and Troop 684 in Zürich, Switzerland, and has been to the International Scout Centre in Kandersteg, Switzerland, and all of the North American BSA High Adventure Bases on challenging treks involving backpacking, canoeing, sailing, and snorkeling.