After a robust nomination process for the ACCESS External Advisory Board (EAB), the ACCESS Executive Council (EC) reviewed all the potential members and selected a group with a variety of backgrounds and experience to ensure that all potential audiences would be represented. With so many different groups of researchers utilizing ACCESS resources, from community colleges to graduate student researchers to large teams at research institutions, the EC strives to select a board that can address the needs of all who use the resources provided through the program.
EAB members serve a 1-2-year term, depending on availability. They advise the EC on a host of topics, and their experience and expertise guide the EC’s management of the program. The EAB helps make ACCESS more responsive to the ACCESS research community by taking a proactive approach to addressing needs before they arise.
New ACCESS EAB members:
Gwen Jacobs, senior advisor, cyberinfrastructure, University of Hawai’i System
Gwen Jacobs Ph.D., served as the Director of Cyberinfrastructure for the University of Hawai‘i System (2013 – 2023) where she led efforts to support data-intensive research with advanced cyberinfrastructure for the University of Hawaiʻi research community. She served as director of the State of Hawai‘i EPSCoR Program and as co-director of the Hawaiʻi Data Science Institute. Her research accomplishments and interests span computational neuroscience, informatics, software tools for data management analysis and visualization, campus cyberinfrastructure and regional and national networking initiatives. Prior to her position at the University of Hawai’i, she served as a professor of neuroscience, department head of cell biology and neuroscience, director of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Undergraduate Biology Education program and assistant Chief Information Officer and Director of Research Computing at Montana State University. Her work has been continuously funded by the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health for more than 30 years and she has been actively engaged in science policy at the national level throughout her career. Recently, she served as a member and chair of the NSF Advisory Committee for Cyberinfrastructure (2016 -2020) and General Chair of PEARC20. Currently, she serves as Vice-President and Vice-Chair of the Pacific Northwest Gigapop Advisory Board and is an active member of the Campus Research Computing Consortium and the Oregon Statewide Research Computing Group. She resides in Portland, OR.
Rebecca Lindsey, assistant professor, University of Michigan
Rebecca Lindsey Ph.D., is an assistant professor of chemical engineering at the University of Michigan (UM) and founding director of the Center for Simulation and Data Intensive Research in Chemical Engineering. Prior to joining UM, Lindsey spent 6 years in the Energetic Materials Center at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), serving as PI for projects focused on developing new capabilities at the intersection of physics-based simulation, machine learning (ML), artificial intelligence (AI) and data science. Now at UM, Lindsey’s research focuses on continuing to refine and develop ML/AI tools in support of enhanced physics-based simulation and analysis. Her group uses these tools to ask fundamental yet previously inaccessible questions about the behavior of chemical and material systems. Through these insights, her group aims to accelerate design and discovery of new materials and to enable tunable yet scalable synthesis of them. Her group’s work spans a broad application space, including understanding how laser-driven compressive shocks can be used to make designer carbon-based nanomaterials to how complexation of layered nanoporous materials can be tuned to enable enhanced control over small molecule separations; however, underlying all of this work is a focus on complex physical phenomena involving systems for which evolution is inherently multiscaled and driven/far-from-equilibrium, and for which chemistry plays a key role. Her work in this space has been recognized through several awards, the most recent of which include the 2025 Neil Ashcroft Early Career Award for Studies of Matter at Extreme High-Pressure Conditions from the American Physical Society (APS) and the 2023 Computational Molecular Science and Molecular Engineering Forum Young Investigator Award from the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE).
Al Anderson, director of cyberinfrastructure programs, Internet2/Minority Serving Cyberinfrastructure Consortium
With over 30 years of experience in technology, primarily in information technology, Al Anderson specializes in networking and server technologies. He holds a master’s degree in computer science, specializing in networking and telecommunications. As the director of cyberinfrastructure programs for the Minority Serving Cyberinfrastructure Consortium (MS-CC) at Internet2, Anderson is actively expanding his expertise in cloud-based cyberinfrastructure, focusing on HPC and storage systems through platforms such as ACCESS-CI and OSG. Anderson has held key leadership roles within the MS-CC, including serving on the Consortium Leadership Board and co-chairing the Programs and Priorities Committee. His extensive experience encompasses cloud computing, data analysis, network architecture, IT management and IT project management. Committed to advancing technology access and capabilities for minority-serving institutions, Anderson continues to drive impactful programs that enhance collaboration and innovation across the community.
Gretta Kellogg, director of strategic initiatives, Penn State University
Currently leading strategic initiatives for Penn State’s Institute for Computational and Data Sciences, Gretta Kellogg brings experience as a program manager of four research centers and enterprise IT professional, serving as a technical member and team lead for high-throughput research initiatives. She brings two decades of accomplishments in heterogeneous systems engineering and program management for multi-million-dollar research initiatives and open-source software platform deployment. She is passionate about working collaboratively with scientists, connecting researchers across disciplines and pursuing new funding resources to enable further discovery. Her experience leveraging high-performance computing systems is informed by her prior success building and maintaining large-scale enterprise IT infrastructures. Kellogg’s leadership experience goes beyond systems engineering on supercomputing systems and includes strong team building and cross-disciplinary deployments for life sciences and AI applications. In the past ten years, she has successfully established and managed four research centers, including responsibility for their multimillion-dollar budgets, grants, IT platform development and deployment and personnel management.
Richard Gerber, NERSC senior science advisor, NERSC / Berkeley Lab
Richard Gerber is Senior Science Advisor at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Gerber has worked with leading-edge HPC systems for almost 40 years, starting at NCSA in the 1980s. Gerber has been at NERSC since 1996 and was HPC Department Head from 2016-2024. In 2023-24 he served as the hardware and integration director of the Exascale Computing Project. Richard holds a B.S. in physics from the University of Florida and a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is an active member of CASC and served three years on the PEARC Steering Committee. He is past president of SciCOMP, the IBM HPC user group, and IXPUG, the Intel eXtreme Performance user group.
Vivian Huangfu, assistant professor, San Diego State University
Vivian Huangfu, Ph.D., has rich expertise and experience in artificial intelligence, business analytics, public health, machine learning and data mining. Her research has yielded many peer-reviewed scientific articles, especially top-tier AI conference proceedings and journals such as IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics, International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), Association for Computing Machinery’s Annual Conference on Multimedia (ACM MM), Annual Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, Journal of Systems and Software and Information Processing and Management. Huangfu is a Grants Research and Enterprise Writing (GREW) Fellow and received numerous grants (e.g., Department of Energy, National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation).
Nitin Sukhija, director of Center for Cybersecurity and Advanced Computing and associate director of honors college, Slippery Rock University of PA
Sukhija is the director of Center for Cybersecurity and Advanced Computing, an associate director of Honors College and an associate professor at SRU. He has been involved in research and management of various projects pertaining to the High-Performance Computing and Cybersecurity challenges in government, industry and academia for over two decades. His areas of expertise are scientific computing focusing on performance modeling, robustness and resilience analysis, cybersecurity and big data analytics. He’s been active in the planning, organizing and participation in HPC and Cybersecurity Training and Education Workshops series at various national and international conferences since 2015.
Kaihua Ding, director, data science & artificial intelligence, AstraZeneca PLC
Kaihua Ding Ph.D., is the director of data science & artificial intelligence at AstraZeneca AZ Brain Group and holds an adjunct faculty appointment at the University of Pennsylvania. He specializes in the development and application of machine learning and artificial intelligence methodologies, leveraging his experience in high-performance computing, large-scale data analytics and software development. Ding has contributed to research on ML, parallel computing, data-driven approaches and emerging cyberinfrastructure tools. He has also participated in NSF SBIR/STTR review panels aimed at advancing scientific computing capabilities.
Returning ACCESS EAB member:
Yanni Chen, postdoctoral researcher, University of Notre Dame
Yanni Chen is an evolutionary biologist focusing on using evolutionary aspects to understand the ecological and evolutionary interaction of plants. Chen primarily uses HPC to perform bioinformatic analysis and evolutionary simulation.
ACCESS would like to thank the outgoing EAB members for their hard work and thoughtful contributions to the program.
Departing members:
Jing Gao, assistant professor of geospatial data science, University of Delaware
Dana Brunson, executive director for research engagement, Internet2
Tabitha Samuel, deputy director and HPC operations group leader, National Institute for Computational Sciences, University of Tennessee
Bronson Messer, director of science, Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Jorge Vinals, director of graduate studies; professor, school of physics and astronomy, University of Minnesota
Roy Chartier, director of architecture, Digital Research Alliance of Canada
Olga Scrivner, assistant professor in computer science and software engineering, Rose-Hulman Institute for Science and Technology
Robert Sinkovits, director of education and training, San Diego Supercomputer Center
Ruth Marinshaw, chief technical officer, Stanford Research Computing Center