The Senior Advisor for Research Computing and Cyberinfrastructure serves on the Executive Committee, the Advisory Council, and each of the Advisory Council’s working groups. The role of the Senior Advisor is to provide advice to, receive advice from, and be fully aware of all relevant activities taking place in the AC, the working groups, the EC, and across the University. The goal of the Senior Advisor is to assist researchers with all aspects of research computing and cyberinfrastructure across Penn State, ranging from the smallest technical issues to the largest policy issues.
Greg Madden has served in the role of Senior Advisor since 2015. Informally known as the Research Guru, Greg is the primary point of contact for researchers with any questions at the intersection of research, technology, services, policy, process, funding, education, outreach, and security. Greg’s role includes:
- Serving as the primary source of knowledge about all aspects of the University’s research computing and cyberinfrastructure, including all IT and administrative services, systems, processes, and policies that might potentially affect researchers
- Serving on each of the Working Groups of the Advisory Council for Research Computing and Cyberinfrastructure, ensuring that each group is always aware of the work being done in the other groups
- Advocating on behalf of faculty for positions which make research easier to accomplish
- Expediting solutions to particularly intransigent issues, particularly those crossing departmental and/or unit boundaries
- Working with Enterprise IT, the ICS, Local IT units, and other IT units across the University to positively influence services, systems, processes, and policies
- Understanding the role of each of the University’s many independent IT units in order to help researchers identify the unit they need and work effectively with that unit
- Leading the effort to catalog common research software in order to make it easier to determine what software is available, at what cost, via what process
- Broadly understanding the research being undertaken across the University in order to establish connections between research groups with similar computing needs
- Identifying Best Practices in research computing, research cyberinfrastructure, research IT, and related research administration, both across the University, across our peer institutions, and nationally
- Developing an onboarding and continuing education process by which knowledge of the research computing and cyberinfrastructure capabilities of the University can be easily disseminated to faculty, grad students, and IT professionals
Contact Greg at 814-865-2536 or send email to researchguru AT psu.edu.