Executive Team
Greg Lukeman
MSc Applied Mathematics, Dalhousie University
Greg has been involved with HPC since 2000, either as a user, systems administrator, or managing executive. As the Chief Technology Officer for ACENET from 2006 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 through to the Digital Research Alliance of Canada transition, 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.
Ines Hessler
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.
Michele Fash
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.
Brian Marsh
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.
Client Engagement and Support
Ross Dickson
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.
Joey Bernard
BSc Physics, BCSci, Diploma in University Teaching, University of New Brunswick
ITIL Foundation Certificate
Joey has been with ACENET since 2008 as a digital research consultant, with the exception of a six-year hiatus with the University of New Brunswick (UNB). His background includes UNB's physics department where he helped develop new instrumentation to study the ionosphere, and UNB's Centre for Enhanced Teaching and Learning. He is located at UNB, where he is currently developing a remote cloud data storage and access solution for the New Brunswick Institute for Research, Data & Training (NB-IRDT). Joey is a certified Software Carpentry instructor, and has written columns on scientific computing and Python programming for various computer magazines, a recipe book for the Python programming language, and has reviewed articles for the Journal of Open Source Software. He is currently working on his PhD in Physics.
Chris Geroux
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.
Sergiy Khan
Ph.D. Astrophysics, Odesa 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.
Meghan Landry
Gurpreet Matharoo
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, mechanical engineering and neuroscience. He was an active collaborator with researchers studying brain dynamics, which 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.
Yashar Monfared
Ph.D. Electrical and Computer Engineering, Dalhousie University
Yashar joined ACENET in 2023 and is based in Nova Scotia. He has extensive experience managing research projects, developing curriculum, and teaching courses in various disciplines including Engineering, Physics and Chemistry. Yashar completed his PhD at Dalhousie University (Electrical and Computer Engineering Department) in 2018 where he studied statistical nonlinear optical systems and noisy pulse propagation in optical fibers. He also worked on computational and experimental aspects of plasmonic nanomaterials and nanostructures and their applications in spectroscopy, photothermal therapy, water desalination, and biosensing in previous postdoc appointments. Yashar secured several academic grants and scholarships, has published over 40 research articles in top-tier scientific journals and has been the primary instructor in courses at multiple universities.
Adnane Ait Nasser
MSc Computer Science, Université de Moncton
Adnane Ait Nasser joined ACENET in 2023 as our first research consultant based at Université de Moncton (UdeMoncton). Prior to ACENET, he served as a research assistant in the Perception, Robotique et Intelligence Machine (PRIME) research group at UdeMoncton. Adnane’s portfolio includes conference presentations and several published papers in various journals, all related to the fields of AI and computer vision. He holds a Master's degree in Computer Science from the Université de Moncton, and a degree in Computer and Network Engineering from the Moroccan School of Engineering Science. Bilingual in French and English, and with a passion for data science, machine learning, and data engineering, Adnane brings valuable expertise to our clients.
Oliver Stueker
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 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. Prior to ACENET, Oliver was 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.
Serguei Vassiliev
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.
Lydia Vermeyden
MSc. Physics and Quantum Information, Institute for Quantum Computing, University of Waterloo
Training and Development
Grace Fishbein
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.
Tannia Chevez
BSc Computational Chemistry, Memorial University
Tannia joined ACENET in 2023 and is based in St. John’s. She has held positions as a research assistant in various departments, with responsibilities ranging from developing algorithms for an online animal sound repository, to crafting chemical composite films. Proficient in Python, Java, and JavaScript, she has focused on spectral data analysis, SEM image-based nanoparticle detection, and software development for data analysis. Tannia contributed significantly to the publication of a research paper by analyzing potential environmental toxicants, generating millions of chemical structure IDs, and conducting data extraction and analysis using Python, R, and JavaScript, as well as enhancing algorithms for simulating potential environmental toxicants’ behavior in water, soil, and air environments. Tannia’s teaching experience includes a Leader Instructor at Brilliant Labs where she taught a range of digital topics, and a Digital Literacy Instructor for the Association for New Canadians.
Sarah Clarke
MSc 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.
Akshay Ghosh
MSc Astrophysics, Saint Mary's University
Akshay joined ACENET in 2023 and is based in Halifax. His research specialized in time series analysis to study the brightness variability of Active Galactic Nuclei, the innermost regions of galaxies which surround the central supermassive black hole. This involved developing a new method to study this phenomenon using wavelet analysis and resulted in a first-author publication. Akshay’s experience includes extensive use of Python and MATLAB, as well as Unix shell scripting, R, and Fortran. His teaching experience includes teaching assistant positions in undergraduate physics and astronomy courses, which involved assisting with the creation of course materials, supervising laboratories, assessments and lectures.
Infrastructure
Phil Romkey
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 ACENET's Manager of Infrastructure, he was our Lead System Administrator. He also 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.
Raouf Rokhjavan
MCSc Computer Science, Dalhousie University
Raouf joined ACENET in 2023 after receiving his master’s degree in computer science from Dalhousie University. Prior to his role at ACENET, he conducted research on confidential computing and Multi-Party Computation (MPC) domains as a security researcher. His study addressed common vulnerabilities in Threshold Signature Scheme (TSS) implementations utilizing the Trusted Execution Environment (TEE). Raouf also worked as a software developer and security engineer in industry to develop system-level software and security solutions in Linux, which enabled him to have valuable experience and knowledge in defensive security, software engineering, operating systems, networking, and system administration.
Craig Squires
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.
Julian Squires
Julian joined ACENET in 2024 and is based in St. John's NL. His background includes 25 years of work as a software developer, spanning a wide range of systems, technologies, and languages. He has been involved in free software/open source for several decades and has contributed to the Linux kernel, glibc, OpenWrt, Debian, as well as other projects.
Karl Vollmer
BA History, Oregon State University
ITIL Foundation Certificate
Karl has worked with ACENET since 2010 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.
