Meet Our Team
The Research Computing Services team works across the University to help support the computational, data, and technology needs of our researcher community through consultation, training, collaborative projects, and a range of resources and services.
We work closely with our colleagues in Cyberinfrastructure who develop and operate computing, storage, and data transfer systems and platforms.
Are you interested in joining our team? Full-time staff open positions include Senior Computational Specialist, Computational Specialist, and IT Business Manager. Visit Careers in Northwestern IT to learn more, and apply.
Jackie leads the Research Computing Services team in delivering a portfolio of computational and data services supporting Northwestern's diverse breadth of research domains. She brings experience with diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts and effective team management to leadership positions in national research computing and data organizations, including CaRCC and EDUCAUSE. Read more about Jackie.
Research Data Services
Christina leads Data Services and manages the teams that support researchers with data science, visualization, data management, storage, research workflows, and research software engineering services. She works with organizations including US-RSE, CaRCC, and ADSA to support the development and professionalization of careers in the research computing and data field. Read more about Christina.Ritika Giri
Data Scientist
Brian works with researchers to transfer, secure, and manage their data across a variety of platforms. He collaborates with partners across Northwestern to ensure researchers' data management needs are supported throughout the research process. Read more about Brian.
Colby leads the data science and visualization team in providing consultations, training, and collaborative project support to researchers across Northwestern. She has taught thousands of Northwestern researchers to use Python, sped up researchers' code, and mentored dozens of student consultants. Read more about Colby.
Research Computing Services
Alper leads the team facilitating researchers' access to and effective use of computational resources both at Northwestern and through external services. He is a recognized leader in developing student consultants and shares this experience through national research computing and data forums such as CaRCC and PEARC. Read more about Alper.Scott uses his experience from astrophysics to support researchers across all domains in using Quest and other computational resources. He additionally manages the student computational consultant team and ensures that Quest's documentation and training materials are effective tools for Quest users. Read more about Scott.Data Science Student Consultants
Haley Carter
Haley is a PhD student in the Plant Biology and Conservation department in partnership with the Chicago Botanic Garden. Her research focuses on the ecology and evolution of different biochemical products in plants, and she originally became interested in learning bioinformatic and computational tools to incorporate metabolomic and genomic data into her research. Haley works mostly with R and the Unix command line but is also familiar with Python and Python-based pipelines.Rahul Devathu
Rahul joined Northwestern as a transfer student from Vanderbilt University in 2020 and is majoring in neuroscience and data science on the pre-medical path. He enjoys the interdisciplinarity of data science and picking up something new during every consult. His research interests include the applications of machine learning in medicine, computational neuroscience, and precision medicine.Daniel Encinas Zevallos
Daniel is a PhD candidate in political science. His work focuses on political regimes, subnational politics, and civil wars in Latin America. His methodological interest lies in advancing multi-methods research designs and the application of qualitative methods to experimental and statistical analysis. He enjoys helping people with their R projects, providing online resources, and discussing alternative approaches to coding issues.
Arne Holverscheid
Arne is a PhD student in the Department of Political Science studying comparative politics and political methodology. He is also in the master's program in the Department of Statistics and Data Science. His main academic interests lie in political behavior, quantitative methods, and computational social science. He is studying the causes and mechanisms of far-right political success, focusing on processes of normalization of far-right ideology in mainstream politics.
Ren Lopez
Ren is a PhD candidate in materials science and engineering. Her research is using cheminformatics and automated network generation to discover new biobased materials, their properties, and how to make them. She is most familiar with Python and C/C++ but has familiarity with Matlab, Bash, and Java. She loves learning new coding languages and how other disciplines apply them.Julie Anh Nguyen
Julie Anh is a PhD candidate in the applied math department. Her research focuses on the identification of dynamic systems from data using a combination of techniques from data assimilation and machine learning with applications in synthetic biology. Julie works mostly with Python and command line but is also familiar with Quest, Matlab, R, and other statistical tools used in the social sciences, such as Stata.Jose Sotelo
Jose Sotelo is a PhD student in the cognitive psychology program and a master’s student in the statistics department. His research revolves around spatial cognition. In particular, how people build cognitive maps in large-scale space as well as how individual and cultural differences impact spatial thinking. Jose is most familiar with R but has some with other languages and statistical tools.
Carrie Stallings
Carrie Stallings is a PhD student in sociology and a Native and Indigenous Studies Cluster fellow. In her work, she primarily uses R and Stata for statistical analysis and data visualization. Her current research focuses on income and wealth inequality, particularly on the roles that government and educational institutions play in the life outcomes of Black and Indigenous peoples. She is also a member of the CoronaData U.S. team at Northwestern.Dan Turner
Dan joined Northwestern in 2017 as a linguistics PhD student. Previously, he taught courses in linguistics, writing, and journalism and conducted research in linguistics at the University of Minnesota Duluth. His current research interests include prosody, mental representations of sounds, and adaptation. He is familiar with R and Python, as well as various languages and statistical tools common in the social sciences.Pat Zacher
Pat is a PhD candidate in the Department of Psychology's brain, behavior, and cognition program. His research focuses on spatial attention. In particular, he is interested in how people shift attention around their environments and how this ability applies to complex interfaces. Pat is most familiar with R but has experience in Python and Matlab.Computational Support Student Consultants
Saya Rene Dennis
Saya is a PhD candidate in the Department of Preventive Medicine at Feinberg School of Medicine. Her research focuses on the applications of machine learning and deep learning algorithms in patient genomic data, as well as in electronic health records. She most frequently works with Python, Unix commands, R, and SQL and is interested in various tools that facilitate the handling of large-scale data.
Xamantha Laos
Xamantha is a sophomore from Peru majoring in economics and computer science with a minor in data science. She wrote her first line of code during her first quarter of study at Northwestern and has since become passionate about programming and its applications for educational purposes. She enjoys working on projects focused on data visualization and is familiar with R and Python.
Alexis Porter
Alexis is a PhD candidate in the Department of Psychology's brain, behavior, and cognition program. Her research focuses on evaluating individual differences in brain networks as it relates to behavior and psychopathology. This work involves the use of various neuroimaging software, such as workbench, dsi-studio, fmriprep, mriqc, fsl, afni, and freesurfer. She has extensive knowledge of brain-imaging data structure (BIDS) formatting, Unix commands, R, Python, and MATLAB.
Anthony Pulvino
Genomics Compute Cluster Consultant
Anthony is a PhD student in the interdisciplinary biological sciences program. He is doing research with the Amato Laboratory, focusing on the interactions between human and non-human primate host genomes and their microbiomes. He leverages molecular biological, evolutionary, and anthropological perspectives to explore the genetic underpinnings of our shared primate biology in wildtype and disease contexts. Anthony enjoys learning new software tools and scripting for R, Unix, and Python data-analysis projects.
Matt Selensky
Matt is a PhD candidate in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences. His research focuses on the microbial ecology of caves, which has given him the opportunity to work with large bioinformatic datasets on Quest using R and Python. Matt assists the Northwestern high-performance computing research community by troubleshooting problems faced by Quest users, preparing teaching materials, and helping on other projects relevant to Research Computing.Xiaoyu Xie
Xiaoyu is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. His research aims to develop scientific machine learning algorithms to accelerate numerical simulations and discover physical laws in the fields of manufacturing, fluid mechanics, and solid mechanics. He is passionate about solving challenging scientific and engineering problems using flexible and robust artificial intelligence methods. Xiaoyu works primarily with Python and the Unix command line, and he is also proficient in using data analysis and visualization tools.Lucas Wesonga
Lucas is an undergraduate student studying computer science, with an interest in cybersecurity. He has worked in projects related with web and game development. Since joining the Research Computing Services team, he enjoys learning about high-performance computing and its applications.
