Dr. Richard Loft is an expert in high performance computing applied to modeling the Earth System. In 2001 his team received a Gordon Bell prize (honorable mention) at the IEEE Supercomputing Conference for developing the High Order Method Modeling Environment (HOMME), a scalable atmospheric dynamical core which was subsequently integrated into the widely-used Community Earth System Model. He worked at NSF's National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado, serving as Director of the Technology Development Division in the Computational and Information Systems Laboratory (CISL) from 2006 until his retirement in 2021. He has served on the NSF's Environmental Research and Education and Cyberinfrastructure Advisory Committees. Currently, Dr. Loft is sole proprietor of AreandDee LLC, a consulting firm with clients in the high performance computing and machine learning sectors.