Dan Parker has been an advocate of Free and Open Source software solutions for over 25 years. He has worked in higher education since 2001, starting at Hampshire College. In 2009 he made the leap to UMass Amherst and discovered the wonderful world of High-Performance Computing. When he is not digging into the arcane details of a storage system, he enjoys reading, writing, drawing and the hi-res graphics of the great outdoors.
Kevin Bryan is the Manager of HPC systems at URI, as well as supporting the Unity platform and its users after a URI’s contributions of 55 machines between 2021-2022. He has been doing general systems administration since 2004, and started with HPC in 2015. He has a programming background in languages including C/C++, Python, Java, R, MATLAB and enjoys digging deep to discover the root cause of bugs and performance issues. Free time is spent watching birds and playing chess.
Simon Leary is an undergrad at UMass Amherst (computer engineering 2024). He started at Unity as a junior systems engineer in 2021. He has learned a lot in his first year (special thanks to Hakan and Kevin) and intends to continue doing so. He always enjoyed coding, and is honored to write code that actually gets used. At home, he likes to go rock climbing (indoor bouldering), fix broken things, and play video games.
Sol Jerome is an HPC Systems Engineer at UMass Amherst. He graduated from UT Austin with a B.S. in Computer Engineering. He has supported Research Computing in some way for the majority of his career. He is interested in creating well-defined, reproducible systems to support the advancement of research. His free time is spent trying to keep up with his kids’ hectic schedules.
Wm. Josiah Erikson, who goes by Josiah, came to UMass Amherst in the fall of 2022 after 25 years at Hampshire College, where he served in a variety of roles, including student, Sysadmin, Network Engineer, Staff Trustee, HPC Engineer, academic support for the School of Natural Science and then Cognitive Science, Assistant Director of IT for Infrastructure and Telecommunications Systems, Associate Director of IT for Infrastructure and Web Services, and Hampshire College rep to the Five College CIO Meetings. He loves to solve problems creatively, appropriately, and in context, build and lead invested, inspired teams, and build solutions that are reliable and right-sized. He finally graduated from Hampshire College in 2020, and during the course of his 23-year-long undergraduate career, worked on several animated short films and mobile games, and his Division III was an oral history of the events of 2019 at Hampshire College as seen through the eyes of its employees. He also loves to ride bicycles, go on road trips, play music, and hike. He is excited to be part of the team at UMass Amherst!
Berent Aldikacti is currently pursuing a PhD at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He has a background in medicine and molecular/systems biology and enjoys creating bioinformatics pipelines for omics applications and Shiny apps. In his free time, Berent likes to play board and video games with his friends and family.
Cecile Cres is a PhD student at the University of Rhode Island. She has been an HPC facilitator for Unity since Fall 2021 and started using HPC since 2018. She has a background in biology and computer science and develops bioinformatics tools using deep learning. Her free time is spent playing card games and practicing oenology.
Connor Kenyon is a full time Research Computing Facilitator at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. He has previously been a student facilitator for both Unity and UMass Dartmouth. His research interests are Numerical Relativity, Ocean Modeling, Compuational Performance Evaluation, and Low cost HPC. He is currently finishing his PhD in Engineering and Applied Science at UMass Dartmouth working on projects in black hole physics and ocean modeling.
Georgia Stuart is an HPC Research Scientist and Facilitator at UMass Amherst. She’s particularly interested in HPC workflows, how people interact with HPC systems, and uncertainty quantification. Georgia received her PhD in mathematics from UT Dallas where she worked on computationally efficient uncertainty quantification for seismic inversion. She was a Peter O’Donnell, Jr. Postdoctoral Fellow at UT Austin, where she worked on oil spill uncertainty quantification for the Computational Hydraulics Group. Georgia spends her free time playing with her young son, taking long walks with her family, and practicing calligraphy and lettering.
Hojae Son is a PhD student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He was previously working at an industrial research group, developing AI SDK. His current research field is System for Machine Learning and Distributed System and he is passionate about software design and testing in general. He enjoys listening to music and watching EFL soccer games
Lauren Saloio is a Research Fellow at UMass Amherst. In addition to managing Unity’s documentation and Research Computing & Data’s communications, Lauren manages marketing and communications for the Center for Data Science. Before graduating from UMass Amherst in 2023, she interned at the Center for Data Science as a Technical Writer and discovered her passion for technical writing, web management, and communications. After graduating, Lauren spent the summer interning at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center as a Technical Writer. Lauren enjoys reading, writing, spending time with her family and friends, browsing bookstores, and visiting coffee shops.
Mila Lewis-Peinado is an undergraduate student studying Mathematics with a concentration in Statistics and Data Science at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She joined Unity in Spring 2024 as a Research Facilitation intern and previously worked as a User Services Student Consultant at UMass IT’s Service Desk. Mila’s free time is spent reading, wheel throwing, and spending time with friends.
Shaswat Ganisshan is an undergraduate Computer Science and Math student at UMass Amherst, expected to graduate in 2025. He joined Unity in Spring 2024, as a Research Facilitation Intern. He aims to use his current knowledge and also gain experience in development by contributing to the portal. Outside of work, he likes to play cricket and play badminton in his free time.
Shivan Kamugisha is a PhD student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She joined Unity in Spring 2024 as a Research Assistant. She has a research background in hydrological and ecological modeling. Her research computing interests are data modeling and simulation, optimization modeling, and machine learning for conservation. She enjoys music and dancing.
Anshul Saha is an undergraduate student studying Computer Science, expected to graduate in 2026. He joined Unity in Fall 2022 and has been actively involved in frontend and backend development of the Unity Portal. With almost a year of experience, he has gained valuable knowledge and contributed to the development of the portal. He finds joy in witnessing his code being utilized and aims to continue growing in his role. In his free time, he enjoys playing table tennis, building Lego models, and exploring robotics.
Hakan was a student employee at UMass Amherst from 2019-2022 where he built and maintained the Unity platform in its initial form. Hakan’s background is in electrical engineering, and he now pursues an MS in electrical and computer engineering at UMass Amherst. Hakan now works for Boston University as an engineer on the MassOpenCloud Alliance team and continues to promote collaboration between the universities in the MGHPCC data center. After his time working at UMass, Hakan continues to act as the maintainer of the Unity web portal. He hopes to mature the Unity web portal code base with the help of talented developers to enhance the experience on the Unity platform, as well as open the project to other HPC clusters.