Brian van Essen is the Informatics Group leader and a computer scientist in the Center for Applied Scientific Computing at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). He is actively pursuing research in large-scale deep learning for scientific domains using high-performance computing systems. Brian is the project leader for the Livermore Big Artificial Neural Network (LBANN) open-source deep learning toolkit. He joined LLNL in October 2010 after earning his Ph.D. in computer science and engineering from the University of Washington, Seattle. He also holds a M.S in computer science and engineering from UW, and M.S. and B.S. degrees in electrical and computer engineering from Carnegie Mellon University.