Meet the User Services Staff

Meet the Data Services Group

Natasha Balac, Data Services Group Lead

The Data Services Group provides data allocations for disk and archival storage, and the tools for making data collections available to the community. Natasha received her Ph.D. in Computer science from Vanderbilt University in 2002 with emphasis in Data Mining and machine learning from large data sets. She has been with SDSC since 2003.

Kenneth Nunes

Ken is a Data Applications Specialist in the Data Applications Group. He earned his Bachelor's degree from UCSD in Physics and his Master's degree from UCSC in Physics. He has been with SDSC since February 2005.

Mona Wong, Portals and Web Developer

Mona is a Data Services portal specialist and has been with SDSC since July 2006. She has worked in both industry and academia on numerous scientific applications in neurosciences, biology, and IC chip design. Her work experience includes both standalone and web-based application development from databases to visualization, system administration and user support. She is also an avid dancer and has enjoyed tap, jazz, modern, belly dancing, ballet and others.

Alex Wu, Portals and Web Developer

Alex is a Developer in the Data Applications Group. He earned his Bachelor's degree from Georgia State University in Computer Information Systems. He has been with SDSC since June 2006.

Meet the User Information Services Staff

Dave Hart, User Information Services Group Lead

David has been with SDSC since late 1995 as a writer, web developer, editor and manager of External Relations. He graduated from Georgia Tech with a Bachelor's degree in computer science, Carnegie Mellon University with a Master's in computer science, and the University of Georgia with a Master's in journalism.

Subhashini Sivagnanam, AAP Coordinator

Subhashini joined SDSC in May 2005. She has a Master's degree in Computer Engineering from North Carolina State University (NCSU). Her graduate study focused on Computer Architecture. Prior to joining SDSC, she worked as a research assistant at the Center for Embedded Systems Research (CESR), NCSU.

Diana Diehl, Documentation and User Portals Group Lead

The goal of the Documentation and User Portals Group is to provide timely and accurate information about SDSC resources to our allocated users. A graduate of the University of Illinois, Diana enjoys the camaraderie and professionalism of User Services and the challenge of simplifying documentation for CyberInfrastructure.

Mike Dwyer, Applications Developer

Mike is a Database and Web Interface Developer at SDSC. He designs and develops Web interfaces to various databases, as well as analyzes, designs, and implements support systems for existing processes.

Fariba Fana, User Portals Developer

Fariba is a Web Application Developer with the Documentation Group. She began her work at SDSC in the summer of 1997 as an REU student in the bioinformatics field. She holds a Bachelor's degree in Biology (Animal Physiology and Neurosciences) from UC San Diego. Previously, she worked as a bioinformatics research programmer/analyst on Plant Functional Genomics at SDSC for seven years.

Dima Sokolovskyy, Student Assistant

Dima is currently an undergraduate at UCSD majoring in Bioengineering. He joined the Documentation Group in 2008.

Shanil Daya, Student Assistant

Shanil is currently an undergraduate at UCSD. He has been with the Documentation Group since 2007

Meet the TeraGrid Science Gateways Staff

Nancy Wilkins-Diehr, Director of Consulting, Training & Documentation

The Consulting and Training Group provides front-line support for SDSC's production computing resources. Nancy received her Bachelor's degree from Boston College in Mathematics and Philosophy and her Master's degree in Aerospace Engineering from San Diego State University. She has been with SDSC since 1993.

Meet the Consulting & Training Staff

Mahidhar Tatineni, DataStar Lead

Mahidhar (Ph.D., Aerospace Engineering) has an extensive background in CFD algorithms, plus experience in large scale CFD codes, message passing programming and coding in Fortran, MPI, and C/C++. He has helped in setting up and maintaining two workstation clusters and an IBM SP2 used for parallel CFD computations.

Krishna Muriki, Consultant

Krishna earned his Master's degree in Computer Engineering from Clemson University in December 2004. He has been working as a User Services Consultant at SDSC since February 2005.

Cuong Phan

Cuong is a senior majoring in Computer Science at UCSD. He joined the User Services Consulting staff in October 2006.

Ella Xiong

Ella is currently an undergraduate at UCSD, majoring in Electrical Engineering and Management Science. She has been with User Services since September 2006.

Meet the Education Staff

Diane Baxter, Director of Education

Diane joined SDSC in February 2005. She has a B.A. in Biology from UCLA and a Ph.D. in Zoology from Duke University. Before joining the SDSC, she developed environmental science education programs at the North Carolina Aquarium, Birch Aquarium at Scripps, the Pfleger Institute of Environmental Research, and Quail Botanical Gardens.

Ange Mason, Education Program Manager, StudentTECH and TeacherTECH

Ange Mason serves as the Education Program Manager for SDSC's StudentTECH and TeacherTECH continuing enrichment programs. In addition, she oversees the implementation of and high school and undergraduate student internships within the center. Since joining SDSC in 1985, she has been involved with numerous projects before joining the Education group in 2002.

Jeff Sale, Portals Developer

Jeff's role is to foster the use of high-end computing within the K-20 education community. One of his primary tasks will be to make some of the data archives and repositories at SDSC accessible to K-16 teachers, professors, and their students within a pedagogical framework through the creation of a web-based education portal.

Meet the Scientific Computing Applications Group

Amit Majumdar, Group Lead

Amit (Ph.D., Nuclear Engineering and Scientific Computing) has extensive knowledge in neutral particle transport algorithms using Monte Carlo methods. His experience in parallel computing includes both message passing and shared memory machines, and vector computers.

Dong Ju Choi

Dong Ju (Ph.D., Mechanical Engineering) has experience in high performance computing software, programming, optimization and visualization, and also in database and web programming. His engineering background is in nonlinear stress/strain analysis using finite element methods, acoustics, vibration, and control theory.

Yifeng Cui

Yifeng Cui (Ph.D, Hydrology) has experience in high performance computing on both massively parallel and vector machines, and extensive knowledge in parallelization, optimization and performance evaluation. He also has experience in distributed modeling, multimedia design and visualization. His research background is in the hydrologic/meteorologic modeling, tracer hydrology, climatology, statistics and risk assessment.

Robert Harkness

(Ph.D Astronomy) does research in supernovae, radiative transfer and radiation hydrodynamics. He is currently working with Prof. Mike Norman of UCSD Physics Department. He also has extensive expertise and interest in benchmarking performance of vector and RISC based supercomputers.

Dmitry Pekurovsky

Dmitry (Ph.D., physics) has experience in development, optimization and performance evaluation of software for scientific applications on massively parallel computers. Dmitry's research emphasis has been on computer simulations in elementary particle physics (Lattice Gauge Theory).

Ross Walker

Ross (PhD, Computational Chemistry) is formally trained as a computational chemist but has diversified into the life sciences arena. He has extensive experience in Molecular Dynamics simulations and is an active developer of both AMBER and CHARMM. He has considerable experience in porting and optimizing molecular dynamics codes for massively parallel computers and has experience with both message passing and threads based programming paradigms. His research work is centered on force field development, QM/MM MD development and enzyme reaction path modelling.

Meet the Visualization Services Group

Steve Cutchin, Group Lead

Steve Cutchin (Ph.D, Computer Science) has extensive experience in scientific visualization, computer graphics and animation. He has developed tools, techniques and animations for a variety of scientific disciplines and researchers. He has published articles on Computer Graphics, Visualization, and collaborative systems.

Alex DeCastro, Visualization Scientist

Alex has a B.S. in EECS from U. Berkeley M.S. in Computer Science from UC Santa Barbara. His interests are in internet technology, computer graphics, distributed systems, and computational intelligence.

Amit Chourasia

Amit's role as a visualization scientist is to develop tools,techniques and concepts to visualize scientific data. His experience and expertise in Art, Architecture, Animation and Computer Graphics brings in a unique skill set to Vis Services group. His active area of work is visualization of massive scientific data in various research areas. He received his Master's degree in Computer Graphics Technology from Purdue University and Bachelor's degree in Architecture from IIT Kharagpur.

Homepage: http://users.sdsc.edu/~amit/web/

Meet the Administrative Staff

Linda Surrey

Linda provides administrative support for Anke Kamrath, Director of User Services. She organizes meetings and training workshops, such as the Summer Institute and xRAC meetings; coordinates reports; provides general phone reception for SDSC; and coordinates travel arrangements for the department.