John West is Director of Strategic Initiatives at the Texas Advanced Computing Center, based at the University of Texas at Austin. TACC provides advanced computational services and expertise to the open science community, and is the largest provider of supercomputing resources in the NSF cyberinfrastructure community. Prior to joining TACC, he was Director of the Department of Defense High Performance Computing Modernization Program, a multi-hundred million dollar (annual) DOD-wide program that provides computational expertise, supercomputers, and a national research network for the Defense acquisition, science, engineering, and test communities. Prior to that he held positions in private industry and the federal government, with responsibilities in computational modeling and high-performance infrastructure. He also founded the technical news site insideHPC.com, achieving 1.5 million pageviews per month before he sold it three years after launch; the company remains successful and has grown to include other sites.

West was recognized with the Department of the Army's R&D Award. He was a founding officer of the ACM Special Interest Group on High Performance Computing (SIGHPC) and now serves as its chair. He is past chair of the High End Computing working group of the National IT R&D Subcommittee of the National Science and Technology Council's (NSTC) Committee on Technology, a former Associate Editor in Chief of IEEE Computational Science and Engineering, and founding co-chair of the ACM Diversity and Inclusion Council. A Distinguished Fellow of the Bagley College of Engineering at Mississippi State University, he has served on planning and review boards for universities, the National Science Foundation, and a number of federal agencies.