Team
Spencer R. Pruitt, PhD
Associate Vice President – Academic and Research Technologies
s.pruitt@northeastern.edu
Spencer R. Pruitt received his B.S. degree in chemistry from the University of Minnesota Duluth. He then entered the graduate program at Iowa State University, joining the research group of Prof. Mark S. Gordon. After completing his PhD, he continued his work in the Gordon group as a postdoctoral associate. Afterwards, he spent time as a postdoctoral appointee in the Leadership Computing Facility at Argonne National Laboratory working on massively parallel fragmentation methods and porting code to new architectures. Before coming to Northeastern, he worked as a Computational Scientist at Worcester Polytechnic Institute where he expanded the HPC resources, supported faculty and students with their research computing needs, and served as Interim Director of Academic and Research Computing.
Raphael Schroter, PhD
Director of Research Computing
r.schroter@northeastern.edu
Raphael Schroter is the Director of Research Computing at Northeastern University. He works closely with university researchers across all disciplines, to help them achieve their research goals using Northeastern’s high performance computing resources. He has more than 15 years of research experience in high energy physics, working in large scientific collaborations. During his years as a research assistant at Harvard University he has lead several cross-functional analysis projects in one of the world’s largest neutrino experiment. He holds a PhD from the University of Geneva.
Manasvita Joshi, PhD
Data Scientist
m.joshi@northeastern.edu
Manasvita Joshi is the Associate Data Scientist on the Research Computing team. She is responsible for supporting researchers take full advantage of Discovery through direct interaction; helping them design and implement methods and tools for data curation and visualization; and providing code optimization and scientific software benchmarking. She has over 10 years of experience in high-energy astrophysics, numerical modeling, data exploration, and data analysis. She has been a PI for multiple NASA-funded projects and reviewer for grant committees. She has spoken at over 30 conferences, taught astronomy courses, and mentored students.
Joseph Cooke, PhD
Research Computing Facilitator
j.cooke@northeastern.edu
Joseph Cooke is a Research Computing Facilitator on the Research Computing team. He assists researchers with utilizing high performance computing resources through direct interaction. Joseph has over 7 years of experience in using HPC resources for the modeling of magnetic materials which include studying magnetization and energy flow with a primary focus on numerical stability in spin-lattice dynamics. He has his PhD in Engineering in Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics from the University of Pennsylvania.
Tara Ketchem
Documentation, Training and Outreach Specialist
t.ketchem@northeastern.edu
Tara Ketchem is the Documentation, Training and Outreach Specialist on the Research Computing team with a goal of bridging documentation and communication across the teams in the Academic & Research Technologies department. She has a B.A. in Rhetoric and Writing Studies from Western Michigan University. She has been working in technical writing and document management since 2014.
Joseph Robinson, PhD
Machine Learning Performance Engineer
j.robinson@northeastern.edu
Joseph Robinson is the Machine Learning (ML) Performance Engineer on the Research Computing team. He is responsible for supporting ML researchers and their work on Discovery; helping researchers improve their system performances, track experiments, and generate publishable results; and working to optimize the scheduling of jobs on the cluster using ML. Joseph received his Ph.D. at Northeastern (2020), focusing on applied ML, computer vision, deep learning, and multimodal understanding. He has published over 35 papers in top conferences and journals in machine learning, CVPR, multimedia, and related fields: technical writing is a skill and hobby of his, so feel free to reach out to collaborate on a paper! In addition, Joseph has taught data science at Northeastern University and teaches Machine Learning at Tufts University. Finally, he co-founded AEyeZone with his Ph.D. advisor, Professor Yun Raymond Fu, where computer vision, explainable AI, and predictive analysis makes construction job sites safer. For more information, connect on LinkedIn.
Greg Shomo
Senior HPC Administrator
g.shomo@northeastern.edu
Greg is the Senior HPC Administrator and is an integral part of the Research Computing team. He came to Northeastern’s Research Computing team with over 22 years of experience working at TechSquare as a computer consultant and trainer. Greg specializes in Linux in higher education and research environments. He has also managed the HPC systems in numerous universities including MIT, TUFTS, and Northeastern for over 20 years.
David Hummel
Senior Research Computing Systems Engineer
d.hummel@northeastern.edu
David is an experienced software developer, systems administrator and cloud operations engineer. He has a B.S. degree in Biochemistry and an M.S. degree in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, both from University of California, Davis. He continued working at UC Davis and then at Boston Children’s Hospital developing web-based bioinformatics tools. At Harvard Medical School he worked as a software developer in the Center for Biomedical Informatics (now DBMI), a research systems architect in Research Computing, and a cloud infrastructure engineer in Harvard Catalyst. Before coming to Northeastern, David worked as a DevOps engineer (aka SRE) in Information Technology Services at Boston College.
Marc Bernstein
Research Software Engineer
m.bernstein@northeastern.edu
Marc is our Research Software Engineer who has worked on and helped build several tools for the RC team. He also makes the life of researchers easier by guiding them through obstacles. He completed his degree in Computer Science from Boston University. Marc then went on to work as a full-stack software engineer at John Hancock Life Insurance Company where he focused on Web and Backend Applications and building Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). During that time, he developed a keen interest in research and became a Research Software Engineer while looking for related roles.
Student Assistants
Deena Dasarathan
Assistant Data Scientist – Coop
d.dasarathan@northeastern.edu
Keval Paresh Chheda
Graduate Research Assistant
k.chheda@northeastern.edu
Paarthvi Sharma
Graduate Research Assistant
p.sharma@northeastern.edu
Vrushali Phaltankar
Graduate Research Assistant
v.phaltankar@northeastern.edu
Karan Sunil Joisher
Graduate Research Assistant
k.joisher@northeastern.edu
Keerthana Jaikumar Kolimarla
Assistant Content Developer
k.kolimarla@northeastern.edu
Research Computing Student Alumni
Rhea Dcosta
Rohin Arora
Aparna Shelar
Gaurang Davda
Sriram Ravindran
Khajan Joshi
Girish Pillai
Nitish Tyagi
Sarah Gracia
Jiali Cheng
Arjun Prashanth
Akhil Ajikumar
Prasanth Dwadasi
Prasad Bandarkar
Srinjoy Chakravarty
Aakanksha Duggal
Faustin Combe
Nikhil Manikonda
Surya Periaswamy
Let’s Work Together
Enabling you to advance your research is our mission. Reach out to us with questions, issues, and concerns so we can provide you with the assistance you need.
