New Director of Research Computing
Hussein Al-Azzawi will join our team as Director of Research Computing, effective June 15, 2026. Hussein brings more than 18 years of leadership and hands-on experience designing research and enterprise IT solutions for higher education and public-sector organizations. He will be a tremendous asset to both our technical staff and the faculty researchers we support.
Hussein joins us from the Center for Advanced Research Computing (CARC) at the University of New Mexico, where he served as HPC Research Computing IT Manager. In that role, he led the HPC systems group of engineers, system administrators, and research facilitators; served as the primary liaison between research stakeholders and the supercomputing center; and drove strategic planning, outreach, and cyberinfrastructure proposal development. He has deep experience supporting research environments with CMMC, HIPAA, FERPA, and Export Control compliance requirements.
His technical background spans supercomputing and AI infrastructure design, high-speed networking technologies including 100G Ethernet and 800G InfiniBand, enterprise and research storage platforms, virtualization, cybersecurity, and large-scale research computing procurements. Among his recent projects, he led the design and acquisition of a 4,500-core mixed CPU/GPU cluster supporting AI and advanced computational research, an IBM Storage Scale System 6000 parallel file system, and a 2.4 PB NetApp enterprise storage expansion. He has also been a senior contributor to NSF- and NIJ-funded efforts, including the SAMPRA HIPAA-compliant research environment and the New Mexico Decedent Image Database (NMDID).
Hussein holds an MSEE in Electrical Engineering from New Mexico State University and an MSc in Network Security from DePaul University. He actively contributes to the broader cyberinfrastructure community through organizations and programs, including the Coalition for Academic Scientific Computation (CASC), ACCESS Campus Champions, and the ACI-REF Virtual Residency program, and has published in areas spanning HPC workforce development, networking, and applied neuroscience.
Hussein brings technical expertise as well as his collaborative approach and interpersonal skills. I believe he will be an energetic and knowledgeable leader who will help advance UNC Charlotte’s growing research mission and strengthen our research computing partnerships across the university and beyond.
Please join us in welcoming Hussein when he joins us on June 15.