Lonnie Crosby
University of Tennessee-Knoxville, TN·Computer Science
Modern science often depends on supercomputers, large datasets and machine learning, but most researchers are not trained to use those systems well. The people who bridge that gap are cyberinfrastructure facilitators: staff who sit between scientists and computing resources, helping a biologist scale up a simulation or a social scientist set up a machine learning workflow.
- Fields
Computer Science
Education Research
Engineering
- Topics
cyberinfrastructure
CI facilitation
research computing
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Dec 2027
What they work on
- Build and operate a cross-institutional research engagement network (CIREN) spanning two universities that recruits, trains and places cyberinfrastructure facilitators into multi-disciplinary research projects.
- Train current and prospective facilitators to support research using high-performance computing, machine learning and artificial intelligence, through entry-level training, peer mentoring and community networking events.
- Widen and diversify the facilitator talent pool by recruiting from regional and national cyberinfrastructure organizations and partner universities and engaging the national ACCESS infrastructure.
- Assess and document a facilitation model, with training materials in an open repository and websites linking facilitators to researchers, so other institutions can reproduce it.
More about the research
Such facilitators are scarce, there is no clear entry route into the job, and individual projects struggle to find them. This project treats that workforce shortage as the problem to solve.
Why it matters
Research teams across many fields lose time and capability when no one on hand knows how to use high-performance computing, machine learning or AI effectively. By training facilitators and embedding them in real multi-institution projects, this work could expand the scope of those projects, open a clearer career path for computing staff at universities, and give other campuses a reproducible model plus open training materials for building the same capacity.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Wayne Figurelle
Pennsylvania State University, PA·Computer Science
Deploy advanced cyberinfrastructure linking Allegheny College, Harrisburg University of Science and Technology and West Chester University to the PA Science regional research network for high-performance data transmission and sharing.
Sunita Chandrasekaran
University of Delaware, DE·Computer Science
Build a sustainable, scalable pipeline of Research Software Engineers to support social, behavioral and economic sciences and coastal sciences research, in partnership with Howard University, Delaware State University and Lincoln University.
Ryan Johnson
University of South Dakota, SD·Computer Science
Add computing capacity, including GPU-accelerated nodes, to the Lawrence high performance computing cluster to speed research in clean energy, sustainability, PTSD and climate change across South Dakota.
The school
University of Tennessee-Knoxville: 16 labs on PI Pages, $387M a year on research, 426 research doctorates a year.
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