Current Members
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, Al is actively expanding his expertise in cloud-based cyberinfrastructure, focusing on HPC and storage systems through platforms such as ACCESS-CI and OSG. Al 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, Al continues to drive impactful programs that enhance collaboration and innovation across the community.
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.
Kaihua Ding
Director, Data Science & Artificial Intelligence
Institution: AstraZeneca PLC
Dr. Kaihua Ding is 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 (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) methodologies, leveraging his experience in high-performance computing (HPC), large-scale data analytics, and software development. Dr. 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.
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. Richard has worked with leading-edge HPC systems for almost 40 years, starting at NCSA in the 1980s. Richard 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
Institution: San Diego State University
Dr. Huangfu 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. Dr. 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).
Gwen Jacobs
Senior Advisor – Cyberinfrastructure
University of Hawai’i System
Dr. Gwen Jacobs 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 Professor of Neuroscience, Department Head of Cell Biology and Neuroscience, Director of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Undergraduate Biology Education program and Asst. 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 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.
Gretta Kellogg
Assistant Director of Strategic Initiatives
Institution: Penn State University
Currently leading strategic initiatives for Penn State’s Institute for Computational and Data Sciences, Gretta 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.
William Lai
Assistant Research Professor
Cornell University
William Lai’s research is directed towards understanding the fundamental mechanisms of gene regulation. His research program combines biochemical and high-throughput AI/ML bioinformatic approaches to integrating multiple types of high-resolution genomic data.
Rebecca Lindsey
Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering
Institution: University of Michigan
Brief Biography: Dr. Rebecca Lindsey 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).
Nitin Sukhija
Director of Center for Cybersecurity and Advanced Computing and Associate Director of Honors College
Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania
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 has 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.
Jason Williams
Assistant Director, Diversity and Research Readiness DNA Learning Center
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
Jason develops national biology education programs and has trained thousands of students, researchers and educators in bioinformatics, data science and molecular biology. This has included national outreach for cyberinfrastructure platforms and advisory roles to bioinformatics and education projects and initiatives in the US, UK, Europe and Australia.
Past Members
Dana Brunson
Executive Director for Research Engagement
Internet2
Brunson leads Internet2’s research engagement efforts, is PI of the Research Computing and Data (RCD) Nexus, an NSFCyberinfrastructure Center of Excellence Pilot and serves in leadership roles in the Campus Research Computing Consortium (CaRCC). Through August 2022, she was also co-manager of the XSEDE Campus Engagement Program, including leading the Campus Champions.
Roy Chartier
Director of Architecture
Digital Research Alliance of Canada
A seasoned technology professional, Roy has held roles in government, industry, startups and non-profit organizations delivering high-value workloads at scale, including HPC, HTC and HPDA. In 2021, Roy joined the Digital Research Alliance of Canada as Director of Architecture after spending a year at Laboratories Canada as a senior advisor. In addition, he founded an HPC services company and a charity called HPC for Humanity (formerly The Supercomputer for Cancer Research, aka “Cancer Computer”) founded in 2015 that has grown to a compute ecosystem with installations at six universities and three colocation facilities in Canada and the United States. HPC for Humanity currently supports dozens of projects in cancer, neuroscience and other humanitarian research through generous hardware donations from governments and corporations and the hard work of a dedicated and talented group of volunteers. Roy has completed Executive Programs at MIT Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and the Sloan School of Management. He also has a degree in Philosophy from Carleton University.
Jing Gao
Assistant Professor of Geospatial Data Science
University of Delaware
Gao comes to ACCESS with a wealth of experience in cyberinfrastructure. She’s a transdisciplinary scholar integrating data science, social sustainability and climate change. Gao is a CAREER awardee co-supported by three NSF directorates (SBE, CISE, ENG) and a co-PI of an NSF HDR Data Science Corps project that provides equitable interdisciplinary training in data science to diverse students.
Bronson Messer
Director of Science
Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility,
Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Bronson Messer is a Distinguished Scientist and Director of Science at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) at ORNL. He is also a Joint Faculty Professor in the Department of Physics & Astronomy at the University of Tennessee. His primary research interests are related to the explosion mechanisms and phenomenology of supernovae. He has run on, managed, helped to build and consulted on several generations of supercomputers over the past few decades, including NSF machines like Kraken, Blue Waters, Stampede and Blue Horizon.
Tabitha Samuel
Deputy Director and HPC Operations Group Leader
National Institute for Computational Sciences,
University of Tennessee
Samuel has been an active member of the national cyberinfrastructure community for more than 13 years. Her experience ranges from leadership roles in XSEDE to being an active member of CASC and PEARC.
Olga Scrivner
Assistant Professor in Computer Science and Software Engineer
Rose-Hulman Institute for Science and Technology
and
President
Scrivner Solutions Inc (AI in Healthcare)
Scrivner worked as a Research Scientist for the Indiana University Cyberinfrastructure for Network Science Center (CNS). She is currently involved in research on AI and NLP biases and regulations for Large Language Models and FDA-approved AI algorithms. She’s also involved in several initiatives to bring diversity in computing and leadership as a Women Techmakers Ambassador by Google and a program committee member for ACE Women Network in Indiana.
Eva Siegmann
Lead Research Scientist
Institute for Advanced Computational Science Research & Innovation
Siegmann is the lead research scientist of the Ookami project, an NSF-funded computing technology testbed. She is also serving as Chair of the ACCESS Resource Provider Forum, Associate Director of the Arm HPC User Group (AHUG) and Deputy Director of the Cray User Group–PEAD special interest group. Her research interests include applied mathematics, numeric modeling and high-performance computing.
Robert Sinkovits
Director of Education and Training
San Diego Supercomputer Center
Sinkovits has diverse experience that includes deep technical engagements and leadership positions. He was the Co-PI for the XSEDE Extended Collaborative Support Services program, which engaged with researchers on focused projects to accelerate their computational research and is currently PI or Co-PI on several NSF OAC cybertraining grants.
Jorge Vinals
Professor of Physics
University of Minnesota
Research in nonequilibrium physics, including the role of topological defects and their motion in Soft Matter and Materials Science. Former Director of CLUMEQ (Quebec HPC node in Compute Canada at McGill U.), the Minnesota Supercomputing Institute and President of the Great Lakes Consortium for Petascale Computing (UIUC).