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All-hands Meeting

The NSF EPSCoR RII Symposium took place on Monday, May 11, 2009 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The symposium featured four 'anchor' presentations on CyberTools/Science Driver interactions, a poster competition, an outreach/education session, and plenty of opportunities for networking. Find the Symposium's presentations and posters here.
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Louisiana EPSCoR RII Alumni


Photo MacLaren, Dr. Jon
Center for Computation and Technology
Louisiana State University
maclaren AT cct.lsu.edu
http://www.cct.lsu.edu/~maclaren/
Dr. MacLaren left LSU to work for IMDB in the United Kingdom but remains involved in the HARC development. Dr. MacLaren was a distributed computing researcher in the Grid Computing group at CCT, specializing in scheduling. He graduated with a PhD in Computer Science from Manchester University in the UK in 2001, where he had previously obtained an MPhil. Before this, Dr. MacLaren worked in the software industry for two years. His research interests are focused on the scheduling of multiple types of resources, including High-Performance Computers and Optical Networks.

Photo Seidel, Dr. Edward
Department of Physics and Astronomy
Department of Computer Science
Center for Computation & Technology
Louisiana State University
eseidel AT cct.lsu.edu
Dr. Edward Seidel is the Director of the Office of Cyberinfrastructure at the NSF, and the Floating Point Systems Professor in LSU's Departments of Physics and Astronomy, and Computer Science. Seidel lead CyberTools efforts until he accepted a position with NSF in September 2008. He earned his Ph.D. from Yale University in relativistic astrophysics. Seidel's research interests are in the field of numerical relativity including modeling astrophysics black holes and neutron stars, perturbation theory and boson stars. Seidel has also been an innovator in the fields of grid computing and high performance computing, and in 2006 was awarded the IEEE Sidney Fernbach Prize. Seidel is the Chief Scientist for LONI.

Photo Venkataraman, Shalini
Center for Computation & Technology
shalini AT cct.lsu.edu
http://www.cct.lsu.edu/~shalini/
Shalini left CCT and started working for NVIDIA in summer 2008. Shalini was a research scientist in scientific visualization with the Visualization, Interaction and Digital Arts (VIDA) group at CCT. She graduated with a Master's degree from the Electronic Visualization Lab at the University of Illinois-Chicago in 2004. Prior to that, she was a software engineer at the Institute of High-Performance Computing in Singapore. Her research interests include scalable, distributed graphics and volume visualization using programmable graphics hardware.

Photo Akunuri-Venkata, Prathyusha (Prats)
High Performance Computing
Louisiana Optical Network Initiative
Louisiana State University
Pakunuri AT loni.org
Prathyusha (Prats) is currently working as Grid Services and Portal Analyst with HPC and LONI at LSU. She is going to receive her Masters in Electrical Engineering with IT concentration from Louisiana State University in the Fall of 2007. She started as a Graduate Research Assistant at CCT in the Fall of 2003 and then moved into her current position after gaining some industry experience by taking up a couple of internships in the year of 2005. Her research interests include portal interfaces for HPC and Grid Computing, resource monitoring and scheduling.

Photo Bahsi, Emir Mahmut
Work Package 1
Department of Computer Science
Center for Computation and Technology
Louisiana State University
embahsi AT gmail.com
Emir got his MS in System Science in 2008 and is now working for Epic Systems. Emir Mahmut Bahsi received his bachelor's degree in computer science at Fatih University in Istanbul, Turkey, in June 2006. In his undergraduate studies he implemented a web-based apartment management system and this work became his thesis and entitled as "Apartment Building Management Web Application." He joined LSU to pursue a master's degree in August 2006. At LSU he studied and performed research in the area of high performance computing and grid computing. He focused on grid workflow management systems and collected his work in his thesis as: "Dynamic Workflow Management for Large Scale Scientific Applications."

Photo Cao, Hua
Work Package 3
Department of Computer Science
Louisiana State University
hcao AT csc.lsu.edu
Hua currently works in the Computer Science Department at Mississippi State University. He graduated with a Master's degree in Computer Science from LSU in 2008.

Photo Carbunescu, Razvan
Department of Computer Science
Center for Computation & Technology
Louisiana State University
carazvan AT cct.lsu.edu
Mentors: Drs. Gabrielle Allen & Mayank Tyagi, Mr. Yaakoub El-Khamra
Razvan graduated with a Bachelor's in Computer Science in 2008, and went on to pursue a Ph.D. at the University of California at Berkeley. Razvan worked at CCT from 2004 to 2008. He worked there for two years in the Frameworks Group on different projects that ranged from fixing bug reports to reruning black hole simulations to other numerical projects with Level Set Methods and Computational Fluid Dynamics. With one of these projects he managed to go to NCUR (National Conference for Undergraduate Research) where he presented a paper on Integrating Level Set Methods within Cactus. Later, Razvan worked within the Computational Fluid Dynamics(CFD) group with Mayank Tyagi and Yaakoub El-Khamra on coding different examples, tests and methods of CFD within Cactus.

Photo Chakraborty, Promita
Work Package 1
Department of Computer Science
Center for Computation and Technology
Louisiana State University
promita AT cct.lsu.edu
Promita is currently a Ph.D. student in the Department of Computer Science at Virginia Tech. She was a graduate research assistant of the Center for Computation & Technology at Louisiana State University and a PhD student in LSU's Department of Computer Science. She earned her MS from LSU in System Science (computational biology) in Summer 2007. Promita's research interests are in the field of computational biology and also in building human-computer interaction tools for biology. To meet that goal, she is studying grid computing, high performance computing, and also tangible interfaces. She used LONI for her work in MS project, and thereafter.

Photo Davidson, Andrew
Department of Electrical and Computing Engineering
Center for Computation & Technology
Louisiana State University
adavidson AT cct.lsu.edu
Mentors: Dr. Gabrielle Allen, Ms. Shalini Venkataraman
Andrew is now a PhD student in the Department of Computer Science at the University of California Davis. He graduated with a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from LSU, and was member of the Louisiana Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (LA-STEM) Scholarship Program. Andrew worked at CCT from May 2005 to May 2008 and his research was focused on the use of GPUs for General Purpose computation.

Photo El-Khamra, Yaakoub
Work Package 4
Center for Computation and Technology
Louisiana State University
yye00 AT cct.lsu.edu
Yaakoub El Khamra is graduating with a Master's Degree in Computer Science from LSU in April 2009. He now works for the Texas Advanced Computing Center. At CCT, Yaakoub worked in the Frameworks group on the Cactus computational framework. He was a graduate of the Mechanical Engineering Department of the American University of Beirut. His research interests include computational frameworks, computational fluid dynamics, numerical methods and petroleum engineering.

Photo Juneja, Dr. Dimple
Transport Processes
Department of Computer Science
Louisiana State University
djunej1 AT lsu.edu
Dr. Dimple Juneja was a project coordinator and researcher during the summer of 2008. Her main responsibility was to help coordinate the presentations for the all hands meeting in August. She earned her Ph.D. from MDU in computer engineering in Summer 2007. Dr. Juneja's research interests are in the field of agent technology and computational biology.

Photo Kumar, Jagadish
Work Package 3
Department of Computer Science
Louisiana State University
jmohan1 AT tigers.lsu.edu
Jagadish moved to a different LSU department after working with Dr. Nat Brener on the CyberTools project.

Photo Namala, Gayathri
Work Package 1


Photo Natarajan, Rathika
Work Package 3
Department of Computer Science
Louisiana State University
rnatar1 AT lsu.edu
Rathika Natarajan currently works for the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. She is an alumna of the Department of Computer Science, Louisiana State University, having earned her MS from LSU in Systems Science in Summer 2008. Rathika's research interests are Evacuation Models for Transportation Analysis, Intelligent Transportation Systems and GIS based Modeling. Her MS project was based on Evacuation Modeling and she is now involved in working for the Oak Ridge Evacuation Modeling System.

Photo Rocha, Joao
Work Package 4
Department of Computer Science
Center for Computation & Technology
Louisiana State University
Joao worked with Dr. Shantenu Jha for the CyberTools project.

Photo Rojas, Ana
Work Package 4
Department of Physics
Louisiana State University
arojas1 AT lsu.edu
Ana received her undergraduate degree in physics at the Universidad Nacional de Cordoba on September 2001. She is currently a graduate student in the department of Physics & Astronomy since June 2002, and joined the CCT on June 2006 but left the CyberTools project in early 2009. Ana works in ab-initio simulations of protein folding. She uses the molecular dynamics technique to predict the folding pathway of oligomeric proteins.

Photo Stamou, Katerina
Work Package 2
Center for Computation and Technology
kstamou AT cct.lsu.edu
Katerina currently works for the LSU Information Technology Services. She was a research scientist with interest and professional experience in the field of Grid computing emphasizing to security and portals/lets technology. Katerina joined CCT as an Intern with the prospective to continue for Graduate Studies. Prior to this, she had been working in Parallel Data Center of Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm, Sweden for the OMII-EU project. Katerina's major scientific interest touches the areas of parallel programming and numerical analysis.

Photo Tummala, Sirish
Work Package 1
Department of Computer Science
Louisiana State University
sirish AT cct.lsu.edu
Sirish has now started with the HPC group for LONI as IT analyst 2 working on Grid Services and Portal Developemt. He plans to pursue his research study in future. Sirish graduated from CCT/CS department at LSU with a Masters degree in Summer 2008. During his masters, Sirish worked on the SCOOP project to enable Wavewatch III and ADCIRC workflow management systems. He also implemented a Prioritized Workflow Scheduling system for the project.