Meet the 2018 Mentors

Amit Chourasia is a Sr. Visualization Scientist at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, UC San Diego where he leads the Visualization Group. His work is focused on leading the research, development and application of software tools and techniques for visualization. Key area of his work is to develop methods to represent data in a visual form that is clear, succinct and accurate (a challenging yet very exciting endeavor). He has had an opportunity to work with research groups in diverse science and engineering disciplines and contends that with the help of visualization, domain and data scientists can visually validate and investigate their data, explore and gain significant insights as well as share results within and outside their community.

Dr. Cicotti is a senior computational scientist at SDSC. His research deals with aspects of emerging technology and novel system architecture. His work includes the development of runtime systems to hide communication, improve locality, and increase energy efficiency. He developed software tools for capturing and analyzing data movement, and is currently investigating the use of this information for managing data in NUMA, heterogeneous, and non-volatile memory hierarchies. Current optimization work also includes IO and hierarchical storage systems. Finally, he collaborates on scientific data analysis projects utilizing map-reduce and emerging programming models.

Andreas Goetz is co-director of the CUDA Teaching Center and co-principal investigator of the Intel Parallel Computing Center at SDSC. He has extensive experience with quantum chemistry and molecular dynamics simulations, and is a contributor to the ADF and AMBER software packages, both widely used in academic and industrial research. Andreas develops new multiscale and multilevel simulation models and optimizes code for new HPC architectures, including many-core and GPU accelerators. He collaborates on a variety of research projects in molecular simulation, computational catalysis, biophysics, and drug design, most prominently as a principal investigator with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, as well as an international collaboration with the ENS Lyon in France. His work is funded through the Department of Energy, the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation and Intel. Andreas also enjoys training the next generation of scientists in software development and numerical simulation methods via lectures, workshops and, supervision of interns. Prior to joining SDSC in 2009 Andreas performed postdoctoral research with Professor Lucas Visscher in quantum chemistry at the VU University in Amsterdam and obtained his undergraduate and Ph.D. degrees in chemistry with specialization on theoretical chemistry under guidance of Professors Bernd Hess and Andreas Goerling from the University of Erlangen in Germany.

Thomas Hutton is the Network Architect at the San Diego Supercomputer Center in the division of Engineering and Networking Services. Mr. Hutton also is a co-PI of the CHERuB project, which stands for Configurable, High-speed, Extensible Research Bandwidth. The current project is the result of a second NSF grant to connect the campus’s Science DMZ (PRISM) and SDSC’s Comet and Gordon supercomputers to high-bandwidth national research networks to advance a new range of data-driven research. “CHERuB allows research domains that need very large datas­ets and data flows to exist and not collide with smaller-sized flows in the everyday internet,” according to Hutton.

Martin Kandes is a Computational and Data Science Research Specialist in the High-Performance Computing User Services Group at San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), where he currently helps manage user support for Comet — SDSC’s newest supercomputer. Prior to joining the group, Marty worked as a Software Developer and Service Operator in the Distributed High-Throughput Computing Group at SDSC. There he helped run operations for a metascheduling service managing computing resources for a globally distributed batch system maintained by the Open Science Grid and the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid. He also served as a member of the Open Science Grid Software Team, where he focused on software testing.

Marty obtained his Ph.D. in Computational Science in 2015 from the Computational Science Research Center at San Diego State University. His dissertation focused on modeling the effects of inertial forces on ultracold atomic gases in rotating frames of reference through the use of numerical simulations. Marty also hold an M.S. in Physics from San Diego State University and B.S. degrees in both Applied Mathematics and Physics from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.  His current research interests include problems in Bayesian statistics, combinatorial optimization, nonlinear dynamical systems, and numerical partial differential equations.

Christine Kirkpatrick is the Division Director for IT Systems & Services at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, University of California San Diego. Christine is a principle member of the Institute for Data Science & Engineering. Her research interests include computing at scale (‘big data’), the economics of cloud resources, data science, data ethics, online education, electronic accessibility and equal access. Specializes in architectures, integrations and implementation of large-scale storage and computational resources. She also has extensive experience developing and teaching online courseware and their associated computing technologies. She holds a Masters in Systems Engineering/Enterprise Architecture from UC San Diego’s Jacobs School of Engineering.

Director of SDSC’s Data Enabled Scientific Computing (DESC) divison. DESC is responsible for four major groups: High Performance Computing Systems, User Services, Scientific Computing Applications and Scientific Visualization. SDSC’s XSEDE program is coordianted from the DESC divison by Nancy Wilkins-Diehr, Co-PI of the XSEDE program.
Previously I was director of the Scientific Computing Applications group at the San Diego Supercomputer Center. The computational scientists, in the group, have expertise and experience in High Performance Computing (HPC) and have degrees in various domain sciences such as mechanical engineering, hydrology, biochemistry, nuclear engineering, and physics. The group’s main activities are HPC research and development work in collaboration with domain science users of NSF funded HPC resources. This collaborative R&D effort allows SDSC’s experienced computational scientists to work with domain scientists regarding algorithm development, code optimization, code profiling/tuning, mathematical library implementation, new programming model implementation etc.

I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Radiation Medicine and Applied Sciences , UCSD . Our collaborative interdisciplinary research involves application of HPC for adaptive radiation therapy. We are specifically exploring use of GPUs for real-time re-planning where we need to solve three computationally intensive tasks: patient modeling based on deformable image registration, radiation transport simulation and dose calculation using Monte Carlo methods, and treatment optimization as a large scale optimization problem.

Ange Mason has worked at the San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California, San Diego for almost 30 years. As the Program Manager for SDSC’s K-16 outreach programs, Ms. Mason has created the StudentTECH program, which provides STEM-focused workshops for middle and high school students, and the popular Research Experiences for High School Students (REHS) program. Always innovating and creating, Ms. Mason is currently launching the Mentor Assistance Program (MAP) for high school students. Ms. Mason received her BA in Psychology from UC San Diego.

Dr. Peter Rose is a Scientific and Technical Leader with a 13 year track record in Computational Chemistry, Structure-based Drug Design, and Scientific Software Development. He has progressive expertise from hands-on Drug Discovery project support, scientific methods development, building and leading a world-class Computational Chemistry department, to the development and deployment of enterprise-level scientific software platforms. Dr. Rose has extensive experience in conceiving and implementing leading-edge computational strategies to accelerate Drug Discovery, in building high performing teams, and in hands-on problem solving.

Subha has a master’s degree in computer engineering from North Carolina State University. Her graduate study focused on Computer Architecture and Verification. Prior to joining SDSC, she worked as a research assistant at the Center for Embedded Systems Research at NCSU and at the State of North Carolina Climate Office.

Igor F. Tsigelny is a Research Professor at the Department of Neurosciences, San Diego Supercomputer Center, and Moores Cancer Center. He is a world-known expert in structural biology, molecular modeling, bioinformatics, and structure-based drug design. He received his M.S. in Electrical Engineering from the Technical University in Lviv (Ukraine). He has a Ph. D. in Physics of Polymers from the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. He was a postdoctoral fellow in the University of California in the laboratory of Susan S. Taylor from 1992-1995. Dr. Tsigelny is the author of over 200 papers in scientific journals including the Nature and Science groups of journals, and Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences of the USA. He had published and edited 4 scientific books. The book “Protein Structure Prediction: Bioinformatic Approach” that he edited, has been called “The Bible of all current prediction techniques” by BioPlanet Bioinformatics Forums. He is a member of editorial boards of over 10 scientific journals. He has around 15 existing and pending patents. Three drug-candidates developed by Dr. Tsigelny for treatment of Parkinson’s disease, brain cancer, and hypertension are licensed by UCSD to pharmaceutical companies and are in various stages of development His computational study of molecular mechanisms of Parkinson’s disease has been included in the US Department of Energy publication “Decade of Discovery” where the best computational studies of the decade 1999-2009 have been described.

Jan Zverina, director of SDSC’s External Relations group, has been part of SDSC’s communications team since 2007. He also is a member of the external relations team for the National Science Foundation’s XSEDE program, the nation’s most advanced collection of integrated digital resources and services. Zverina is a former wire service journalist and business reporter, having worked for United Press International and Bloomberg Business News.