Rate My Professor Charlie Peck

Charlie Peck, Ph.D., serves as Associate Dean of Natural Sciences and Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Earlham College. He holds a Ph.D. from Union Institute & University and a B.A. in computer science, a self-designed major, from Earlham College, where he graduated in 1984. Prior to his full-time academic career, Peck worked in industry for twelve years following graduation, including as an administrative programmer in Earlham College's computing services from 1985 to 1989, Senior Software Engineer and Architect at Sybase from 1989 to 1994, and partner at Infocom, a local Internet service provider, from 1994 to 2000. He joined Earlham College as Assistant Professor of Computer Science in 1995 and has held the rank of Professor since 1996.

Peck's academic interests encompass parallel and distributed computing, computational science, bioinformatics, visualization of scientific data, expeditionary science, hardware and software systems, technology for disaster preparation and response, and sustainable energy production and conservation. Since 2012, he has led Earlham College's Icelandic Field Studies program, designing and deploying geocoded sensor platforms for environmental monitoring with field testing in Iceland, studying glacier dynamics at Sólheimajökull glacier with nine students and three faculty in 2017, examining environmental microbial communities through soil and water sampling and DNA analysis, and supporting archaeological excavations including sampling at Skalanes and digs at Seydisfjordur and Stod for Norse settlement artifacts. As co-PI, he spearheaded the LittleFe project, an inexpensive educational appliance for parallel and distributed computing; the Bootable Cluster CD project; and Earlham's Cluster Computing Group. Key publications include "Teaching parallel computing to science faculty: best practices and common pitfalls" (ACM Principles and Practices of Parallel Programming conference, 2006, with D. Joiner, P. Gray, and T. Murphy); "BigFe - A cost and power efficient platform for high performance computing education" (TeraGrid 2006 poster, with A. Lemann, K. Hunter, and J. McCoy); and SIAM posters such as "LittleFe - The low-cost portable cluster for computational science education" (2006) and "Benchmarking and Tuning the GROMACS Molecular Dynamics Package on Beowulf Clusters" (2004). Peck advises the WebDev student group, is profiled as a National Geographic Explorer, and maintains memberships in ACM SIGCSE, IEEE Computer Society, the Supercomputing Conference Education Program, and XSEDE.