About

I’m a Research Software Engineer(RSE) at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. For most of my career, I’ve worked as an IT consultant in Industry. In 2017 I made the jump to academia and have found it to be tremendously gratifying. In this job I get to work as an IT Consultant to science, where my skills are very much in demand. I get to work in such diverse fields as Chemistry, Materials Science, Condensed Matter Physics, Law, Library and Information Science and Earth Science.

I encourage my peers who have worked in industry to consider a late-career change to Research Software Engineering. The work is interesting and our skills are in such high demand. It is a perfefect way to wind up your career.

In research computing we often work on multiple projects. We are allocated some percentage of our time to each project and there is a bit of a juggling act to learn how to slice yourself up and support all of your projects.

One of my largest allocations is to the Institute for Research and Innovation in Software for High Energy Physics (IRIS-HEP), a National Science Foundation sponsored software institute to develop the “state-of-the-art software cyberinfrastructure required for the challenges of data intensive scientific research at the High Luminosity Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC) at CERN, and other planned HEP experiments of the 2020’s.

Through this work I came into contact with project leaders for a Schmidt Foundation sponsored project to build the “next generation trigger” for one of the experiements at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. I’ll explain these titles and concpets in blog posts as we go on.

The project has budgeted for consultants to help with some of the internal workflows related to its development. They asked if I could come to CERN to help design and optimize these workflows.

I will be working on-site for September and October of 2026.