Presenter

Jean-Christophe (“JC”) Desplat is Director of the Irish Centre for High-End Computing (ICHEC), Ireland’s national supercomputing center founded in 2005. With over 30 years’ experience in high performance computing, he began his career at the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre in 1995 and has led ICHEC since 2012. JC specializes in pioneering HPC applications—spanning environmental digital twins to quantum‑HPC platforms—and serves on high-level advisory boards, including for the UK’s EPSRC, Ireland's EPA, the Irish Medical Council, and governing bodies of EuroHPC/JU and PRACE. He holds honorary professorships at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies and the University of Galway and was awarded France’s Chevalier de l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques in 2016. Under his leadership, ICHEC has grown into a hub for national HPC infrastructure, empowering academic, public sector, and SME innovation across Ireland and Europe.