Get to Know the Research Computing Team
Rufus Behr
Research Software Engineer
What led you into your field?
My mother was an English professor and, as part of one of her courses, her students read the book Little Brother by Cory Doctorow, which is a fictional novel about a group of tech-savvy teenagers rebelling against the oppressive surveillance state post-terrorist attack with lots of real technology explanations. My mum gave me this book when I was ~9/10 years old; it struck a chord within my anarchic kid soul. I began programming and became interested in technology, which persists today.
What are you most excited to be working on right now (or looking forward to working on) in RC?
I recently finished some research on Latin Dependency Parsing (identifying the syntactic relationship between words), which should culminate in my first paper. Outside of that research, I’m working on the “IdleBot” that will help police cluster usage by identifying jobs that are idle.
What is something you really want the research community at Northeastern to know about you, or about RC as a whole?
I am very open to assistance and collaboration! Whilst I have more experience specifically within NLP, I have a background in Computer Science and Mathematics, so, if you think I might be of help, feel free to reach out.
What is your go-to karaoke song?
Go-to karaoke song would probably have to be one of My Generation by The Who, Fat Bottomed Girls by Queen, or Make You Feel My Love by Bob Dylan.
Have you read a book recently that you would recommend everyone read?
With a very generous definition of recently, I would recommend everyone read Excellent Sheep by William Deresiewicz.
What skill do you think everyone should have?
I think everyone should be able to play chess.
What was your first screenname?
Sufur (my name backwards, which is canonically pronounced the same as suffer)
What led you into your field?
I’ve been interested in understanding how things work since I was a kid, and I loved odd or unusual animals, which drew me to the field of evolutionary biology. My interest in evolutionary biology led to an interest in coding/programing and in general using computers to solve complex and interesting problems. I love seeing the material output of code when I make graphs or figures of data. And I generally really enjoy the problem solving that comes with troubleshooting package installations or code optimization.
What are you most excited to be working on right now (or looking forward to working on) in RC?
I really love mentoring students and collaborating with faculty to do research. I have two active collaborations now but am always eager to build more! In one collaboration, I am mentoring a co-op student in the analyses of reduced representation genomic data for a species of conservation concern. For this project, we will be building a container image to hold all the software packages used in the analyses of the data. This greatly increases reproducibility and can ease collaboration. We hope that with effective training materials and straightforward scripts, we can showcase the ease and importance of reproducibility of an entire research project via containerization.
What is something you really want the research community at Northeastern to know about you, or about RC as a whole?
We really like to help! In particular, I am very open to building more collaborations with researchers at Northeastern. It’s one of the highlights of my job!
What would you choose to be your personal walk-up song every time you entered a room?
it would either be “Unbreakable” by Jeff Richmond or Cat Power’s cover of “Stay” (and there’s Cat Power’s “Maybe Not”).
Have you read a book recently that you would recommend everyone read?
We read a lot of Frozen fan fiction right now for our 5 year old. So no, I can’t think of any.
What skill do you think everyone should have?
Being kind. Recognizing and respecting the complexity of being human in ourselves and in others. Oh and vim.
What was your first screenname?
Yellow-sea-cucumber, which I used on a cephalopod forum (tonmo) when I was 16ish. Yup.
Serena Caplins, PhD
Associate Bioinformatician
Joseph Cooke, PhD
Computational Scientist
What led you into your field?
Growing up around cars and taking things apart when I was a child led me into mechanical engineering to know how things are built and put together. Studying mechanical engineering led me to wondering about more questions and wanting to discover answers which led me to graduate school and computational mechanics.
What are you most excited to be working on right now (or looking forward to working on) in RC?
The container benchmarking project and working towards a good documented workflow of utilizing containers on the HPC.
What is something you really want the research community at Northeastern to know about you, or about RC as a whole?
I enjoy learning new things in tech and science and enjoy helping people figure out solutions to errors and problems they are encountering.
What is your go-to karaoke song?
California – O.A.R
Have you read a book recently that you would recommend everyone read?
Podman in Action – Daniel Walsh
What skill do you think everyone should have?
Compassion and understanding
What was your first screenname?
jrdragster1412
What led you into your field?
I really liked writing and I thought technical writing would be an easier way to get a job than creative writing.
What are you most excited to be working on right now (or looking forward to working on) in RC?
I am excited to be working with the team to improve our online documentation.
What is something you really want the research community at Northeastern to know about you, or about RC as a whole?
The RC team provides great live virtual training and on-demand training with a wide range of topics for beginners and advanced users.
What would you choose to be your personal walk-up song every time you entered a room?
I would like my personal song to be Chattahoochee by Alan Jackson.
Have you read a book recently that you would recommend everyone read?
Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You by Ibram X. Kendi and Jason Reynolds
What skill do you think everyone should have?
First aid, at least the basics.
What was your first screenname?
Taradactyl14
Tara Ketchem
Documentation, Training, and Outreach Specialist
Timothy Rudenko
HPC Systems Administrator
What led you into your field?
My friends convinced me to build a PC some years ago, and that spiraled out of control into a huge passion for technology. I started off programming but I kept gravitating towards *nix systems, finding ways to automate tasks, and running APIs. I can’t picture doing anything else.
What are you most excited to be working on right now (or looking forward to working on) in RC?
Since last summer we have been making big strides in moving our systems to the future, this includes the introduction of Rocky 9 compute nodes, Podman for HPC, and other things.
What is something you really want the research community at Northeastern to know about you, or about RC as a whole?
I make music in my free time.
What is your go-to karaoke song?
Blu Mar Ten – The Fountain, I’m a huge fan of 1990s drum n bass. It’s 11 minutes of breaks, all of which are fantastic. 7 minutes of build up into a fantastic melody.
Have you read a book recently that you would recommend everyone read?
No book in particular, I am a big fan of anything released by No Starch Press.
What skill do you think everyone should have?
Knowing the difference between login and compute nodes.
What was your first screenname?
I went by d3nk0 when I was younger.
What led you into your field?
I met a guy at a party and we argued about mac-os versus sgi. he turned out to be a great friend and introduced me to unix. lesson-learned, “be careful what you talk about at parties – it could change your life.”
What are you most excited to be working on right now (or looking forward to working on) in RC?
We will be making some updates to the system over the summer. Working on those plans, proofs of concept, etc. are things that i enjoy doing. That’s exciting, right ?
What is something you really want the research community at Northeastern to know about you, or about RC as a whole?
Without constructive feedback, we’re really just guessing.
What would you choose to be your personal walk-up song every time you entered a room?
This is a most terrifying question. How about John Cage’s 4’33
Have you read a book recently that you would recommend everyone read?
A whole book?!? No, but RFC 2324 is always a pleasant read.
What skill do you think everyone should have?
Soldering.
What was your first screenname?
qux. I thought the first three metasyntactic variables were too pretentious.
Greg Shomo
Senior HPC Administrator
