MSc Applied Mathematics, Dalhousie University

Greg has been involved with HPC for 18 years, either as a user, systems administrator, or managing executive. As the Chief Technology Officer for ACENET from 2007 to 2019, Greg guided the creation of ACENET, its technical team, and its computing resources. He has been a participant in the evolution of Compute Canada since its inception, representing Atlantic Canada on the Technology Leadership Council, numerous committees and various working groups. He represented Atlantic Canada on the ARC working group of the Leadership Council on Digital Research Infrastructure (LCDRI), the group that prepared the report for the federal government that resulted in significant new funding for digital research infrastructure in Canada.

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Ph.D. Geosciences, University of Bremen

Ines joined ACENET in 2020 as its Chief Technology Officer. Prior to ACENET, she was the technical and operational lead of the national MERIDIAN project (Marine Environmental Research Infrastructure for Data Integration and Application Network) developing machine learning-based data analysis and management solutions. Ines’ thesis research focused on past climate change events and related inter-hemispheric variations in the terrestrial and marine realm. Following several research positions in Germany and later Australia, she began exploring the world of data management and digital research infrastructure while working at a TERN (Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network) project and the Australian National Data Service (ANDS), now known as the Australian Research Data Commons.

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MBA, Dalhousie University
BBA, Acadia University

Michele has been in the marketing field for 30 years, her work spanning both the public and private sectors and a variety of industries. Along the way, she’s worked in Public Affairs with the Department of National Defence in Ottawa, and marketed fries for McCain Foods (Canada), sand and gravel for The Shaw Group Ltd. and medical devices for Uplift Technologies. She’s also done private consulting with organizations ranging from start-ups to large nationals. Michele’s core skills include strategic planning & execution, research & analysis, branding & product positioning, and new product planning & launches. Within ACENET, Michele is responsible for building the ACENET brand, expanding awareness of the benefits of advanced research computing and attracting new clients.

Email
902.680.2693

MBA, Athabasca University
MCPM, Memorial University/York University

Brian joined ACENET in January 2023 from the private sector and has over 25 years of experience specializing in project management, financial and technology operations & management as well as strategic planning and business development. Prior to ACENET, he spent 13 years in accounting, finance and project management roles within the energy industry. Throughout his career, Brian has delivered numerous projects and services to both internal and external clients in a structured, reliable, efficient and cost effective manner.  

Email
709.682.0891

Ph.D. Computational Fluid Dynamics, Heriot-Watt University, Scotland

Angus joined ACENET in 2022 with over 15 years of experience in modelling turbulent flow using both his own custom Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) software and OpenFOAM. He began working with CFD during his Ph.D. studies, using Large Eddy Simulation to model wind and tidal turbines. After gaining his doctorate from Heriot-Watt in 2009, he worked as research fellow at Heriot-Watt and the University of Edinburgh, leading projects modelling wind farms and tidal turbines. More recently, he developed CFD models of the Grand Passage strait in Nova Scotia, running simulations on the UK supercomputing systems HECTOR and ARCHER. These projects involved industrial collaboration with companies such as TUV NEL, Scottish Power, and Vattenfall AB.

While specializing in CFD and scientific visualization, Angus has also extensively programmed in (and with) C, Fortran, Python, MPI, OpenMP and multigrid solver libraries such as PETSc.

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MSc in Computational Chemistry, Dalhousie University

Sarah joined ACENET in 2023 and is based in Nova Scotia. She has a range of teaching experience, and held regular positions as a TA and senior TA during her studies.  She has taught chemistry, programming, and through a private studio, music. Passionate about scientific literacy, Sarah was a supervisor with Brilliant Labs, where she developed teaching materials, and taught programming and robotics to youth in St. John's. She also led a two-day virtual professional development workshop for teachers in Newfoundland & Labrador, helping to bring digital skills workshops to more classrooms in the province. In her Master's degree, she focused on combining methods for efficient crystal structure prediction, as well as assessing the requirements for a successful structure-generation protocol, which involved interfacing various software by means of shell scripting, Python, and MATLAB.

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Ph.D. Computational Chemistry, Queen’s University
ITIL Foundation Certificate

Based at Dalhousie University, Ross joined ACENET in 2007 as a Research Consultant. His responsibilities span education, documentation, and client support, and he manages job scheduling policies on ACENET’s high-performance computing clusters. He has worked with users across many disciplines including chemistry, physics, biology, oceanography, neuroscience, several engineering disciplines, philosophy, and management studies. Following his doctoral and postdoctoral studies in computational chemistry, Ross worked in software development for Hypercube Inc., makers of HyperChem for Windows, and for Molecular Mining Corporation where he helped specify some of the earliest software for analyzing high-throughput gene expression data.

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MSc Biomedical Physics, Ryerson University

Grace joined ACENET in 2019 and is based in St. John's at Memorial University of Newfoundland. She completed her undergraduate degree at Memorial in applied math and physics and then pursued her masters in biomedical physics at Ryerson University. Her masters research involved exploring the design and behaviour analysis of microbubbles and nanobubbles, which are used as contrast agents in ultrasound. This required the development of an algorithm to sort through and differentiate RF data demonstrating bubble behaviour using MATLAB. Throughout her masters, Grace sought out professional development opportunities that focused on improving learning and teaching in higher education. This led her to complete her Level 2 with SEDA's Professional Development Framework, developed in the UK.

Email
709.864.7239

Ph.D. Astrophysics, Saint Mary’s University

Chris has been working in HPC since 2005 and joined ACENET in 2015. He is based at Dalhousie University and has a focus on big data. During his PhD he developed a multi-dimensional hydrodynamics code utilizing the parallel environment at ACENET to explore the interaction of convection and radial pulsation in RR Lyrae variable stars. A key component of this work was developing a domain decomposition framework using OpenMPI to parallelize the code.

More recently he was an associate research fellow at the University of Exeter where he worked on a team of international researchers. Key roles included the continued development of a hydrodynamics code, analysis and visualization of the resulting large datasets, development and maintenance of command-line tools used by the group, and to conduct novel research. His focus was on understanding how newly accreted material is redistributed by convection in young forming stars, and how the existing convection is modified by the accretion of new material.

In addition to these formal roles Chris also has interests in visualization and 3D computer graphics.

Email
902.494.2444

Ph.D. Astrophysics, Odessa National University, Ukraine

Sergiy has been providing user support with ACENET since 2007, and has managed HPC and server infrastructure since 2002. Sergiy was the driving force behind our consistent user experience across HPC systems and our user and system documentation. He has built and/or customized and maintained our software environment, Infiniband and Myrinet networks, SGE installation, ticketing system and the wiki-driven website. He works closely with systems administrators to diagnose and troubleshoot problems, test environments, and analyze performance. Prior to ACENET, Sergiy was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Western Ontario doing computer modelling of stellar atmospheres.

Email
902.491.6234

Ph.D. Theoretical Condensed Matter Physics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India

Gurpreet joined ACENET in 2016 and is based at St. Francis Xavier University (St. FX). A physicist who began his research career studying amorphous materials, supercooled liquids, and the glass transition, Gurpreet was then involved in several original and inter-related lines of research addressing climate change and studying climate of the past. He's since been involved in a variety of interdisciplinary computational research areas, including physics, chemistry, earth sciences and mechanical engineering. Gurpreet's most recent passion is neuroscience research, whereby he is in an active collaboration with researchers studying brain dynamics. This collaboration led to a joint paper on the effects of ongoing brain processes on pain. Gurpreet is fluent in coding in Fortran, C++, C and has a solid understanding of MATLAB. He has also taught undergraduate courses in the physics, engineering, and earth sciences departments at St. FX.

Email
902.867.2145

Ph.D. Electrical and Computer Engineering, Dalhousie University

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MSc Computer Science, St. Francis Xavier University

Mostafizur joined ACENET in 2023 and brings a breadth of expertise in computer science and teaching. He completed his MSc degree in Computer Science from St. Francis Xavier University in 2022, where his research focused on novel methods for producing reliable artificial intelligence technologies, including deep learning applications. As a teaching assistant, he facilitated courses on C programming and Operating Systems. Prior to coming to Canada, Mostafizur worked as a lecturer at Canadian University of Bangladesh in Dhaka, where he taught a range of courses from basic computer fundamentals to core computer science, and gained experience in developing course curriculums and assessments, and engaging with diverse student populations. He has published several research articles in journals and conferences.

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Dr. rer. nat. Computational Chemistry, University of Paderborn, Germany

Oliver is based at Memorial University and has been with ACENET since 2015. He has over 15 years of computational research experience in the fields of molecular modelling, chemistry, and bioinformatics. He has held post-doctoral positions at the Donnelly Centre for Cellular & Biomolecular Research at the University of Toronto, doing computational network biology working on active cell maps, and at the NRC’s National Institute for Nanotechnology in Edmonton, where he performed molecular dynamics studies on the interactions between proteins and functionalized Gold nano-particles. Most recently, Oliver has been working with Dr. Ray Poirier at Memorial University, and Dr. Jason Pearson at the University of Prince Edward Island on ‘Retrievium’, a repository for quantum-mechanical information.

Email
709.864.3021

Ph.D., Biophysics, Moscow State University, Russia

Serguei joined ACENET in 2019 as a Research Consultant at UNB. His background is in experimental and computational biophysics. After doctoral and postdoctoral studies in biophysics of photosynthesis, Serguei was Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellowship recipient at the Technical University of Berlin where he studied energy conversion in natural and artificial photosynthetic systems using ultrafast laser spectroscopy. More recently he was working as a research associate at Brock University with Dr. Douglas Bruce, where he was engaged in inter-disciplinary research of photosynthesis, integrating biology, computational chemistry, physics and data science. Working at Brock University, Serguei developed specialized programs for global and target analysis of time-resolved spectroscopic data, and analysis of molecular dynamics trajectories. Serguei’s research interests include molecular modelling, simulations of water and oxygen transport in proteins, and computation of the properties of cofactors in protein complexes.

Email
506-458-7141

MSc. Physics and Quantum Information, Institute for Quantum Computing, University of Waterloo

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MCSc Computer Science, Dalhousie University

Robbie joined ACENET in May of 2020, just prior to receiving his master's degree. As a researcher, his areas of specialization are privacy and security, authentication, and usability. He is interested in better securing vulnerable, under-resourced, and novice users. His thesis work and associated research addressed the promise of communicating the problem of password reuse via password managers, in an explicitly cross-site context. Robbie's past work with industry partners and government has been tied to network security, and the development of adaptive intrusion detection systems.

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BSc Computer Science, Acadia University
ITIL Foundation Certificate

Phil has over 25 years of experience as a Unix System Administrator, working in academic and industry environments performing IT infrastructure design, implementation and management. He has significant experience in Unix, TCP/IP networking, Myrinet interconnect, computer security, hierarchical file systems (including SAM-QFS) and cluster computing systems. Prior to becoming the Lead System Administrator with ACENET, Phil worked as a Unix Administrator for the Research Institute at Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children and was the Unix and Network Administration Team Leader for software developers at Alias Research.

Email
902.496.8784

Ph.D. Philosophy, University of Toronto
Diploma in Information Technology, Memorial University of Newfoundland
ITIL Foundation Certificate

Craig has been with ACENET since 2009, and has over 16 years experience as a Systems Administrator. He has managed and maintained Sun/Oracle/Dell/IBM/HP/DEC/Cisco servers, blade centres, SANs, tape systems, and network switches (fibre channel, ethernet, and Infiniband). He has significant experience in identity and access management, OS management, login services, firewalls and security, web services, job scheduling, revision control, performance monitoring, DNS, DHCP, email, virtualization, and SAN/distributed/tiered file systems. Craig has worked at Memorial University since 1999 as a Systems Administrator with Information Technology Services, and the Departments of Computer Science and Mathematics. He has been designing, building and managing LDAP and identity management systems since 2000, including the current campus-wide system, as well as ACENET's system.

Email
709.864.4505

BA History, Oregon State University
ITIL Foundation Certificate

Karl has worked with ACENET for ten years and has 20 years experience in networking, systems administration and programming in academia. His experience includes: six years in front line user support; 10 years of web application development (includes interface design, front end user support database design etc.); two years of responsibility for Campus-wide System and Network Security; ten years of nationally certified leadership and skills training (instruction, group management, customer service/user experience trainer, logistics); and, three years on a provincial board and 1 on a national board (strategic planning, project management, user needs assessments). Karl provides systems administration support for ACORN, including maintaining its stratum 1 time servers. He has significant experience with Infiniband networking, network security, application development, parallel file systems, HPC scheduling systems, and VMware virtualization. Prior to Dalhousie, Karl managed the Oregon State University residence hall network - over 10 buildings with over 5000 devices - in addition to designing and implementing campus-wide network management tools, and detecting and responding to network security issues campus-wide.

Email
902.494.1217

BCSci, Acadia University

Graduating from Acadia in 2015, Daniel joined ACENET in 2016 as a software developer, with responsibilities both regionally and on the national Compute Canada development team. In April 2022, Daniel transitioned from Compute Canada to the Alliance. Daniel has completed multiple co-op software development positions. His experience is in web development, both front- and back-end, primarily using Ruby on Rails. His background includes working with compiled languages such as C, Java, Go and Crystal. He has specific interests in software maintainability, optimization and efficiency. Daniel’s thesis focused on developing algorithms for the heuristic optimization of university exam scheduling. As an undergraduate, Daniel, as part of three-person team, placed third in the 2013 Science Atlantic Computer Science Programming Contest.

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MLIS, Dalhousie University

Lee manages Research Data Management service delivery across Canada both directly and through partnerships with other organizations, including national advanced research computing providers. He also oversees the operations of the Federated Research Data Repository, an access and discovery portal for Canadian research data. Prior to taking on this position, Lee worked with ACENET as a Research Consultant for Data Management serving Atlantic Canadian researchers. He also worked for the Marine Environmental Observation Prediction and Response (MEOPAR) network’s Data Management team, solving issues related to the storage, discovery, and accessibility of ocean data. Lee holds a Master of Library and Information Studies degree (Dalhousie University) and a BA in English (Mount Allison University).

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