Team
Research Computing Team
To support Northeastern’s research enterprise, IT Services has over 20 full-time staff roles dedicated to the research needs of the university, from both within the Research Computing department and throughout the ITS organization. For open positions at ITS and on the Research Computing team, visit careers.its.northeastern.edu.

Akwasi Appaih
CMMC Information Security Engineer a.appiah@northeastern.edu

Wilson Bui
DevOps Engineer w.bui@northeastern.edu
Wilson assists with maintaining and deploying the Electronic Proposal Approval & Workflow System alongside the rest of the Research Computing Team. He has over 8 years of experience in the DevOps space working with enterprise–level applications deployed through CI/CD Pipelines and maintained in Cloud Providers like AWS as Infrastructure as Code.

Serena Caplins, PhD
Associate Bioinformatician s.caplins@northeastern.edu
Serena has extensive experience with non-model organism genomics, including de novo genome or transcriptome assembly, genome annotation, genome liftover, variant calling, and population genetics. She is eager to help biologists with their computing needs and is skilled in experimental design (GWAS, Population genetics, and quantitative genetics), data analysis, and visualization in RStudio. Serena earned her PhD from UC Davis in Population Biology.

Anitha Chelleperumal
Full Stack Developer a.chellaperumal@northeastern.edu
Anitha provides support for the Electronic Proposal Approval & Workflow System suite of products (eCD and cCLAWS). She acts as the primary liaison between Northeastern and the vendor technical team. She is involved in tracking and resolving issues raised by customers, managing, and promoting code, and directly assisting users. Additionally, she supports integration with Northeastern HR systems that provide functionality across the ePAWS suite.

Joseph Cooke, PhD
Computational Scientist j.cooke@northeastern.edu
Joseph assists researchers across multiple departments with utilizing high performance computing (HPC) resources through direct interactions. He has been working with HPC resources to model magnetic materials, including studying magnetization and energy flow with a primary focus on numerical stability in spin-lattice dynamics since 2014. Joseph also has experience in benchmarking scientific code to determine optimal run conditions on HPC resources. He earned his PhD in Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics from the University of Pennsylvania.

Edgar Franck
Lead of Research Application Support e.franck@northeastern.edu
Edgar is the team lead of the specialized, cross-functional Research Technologies support group. He provides dedicated assistance to research groups through guidance on hardware, software, workflows, and secure data solutions. Edgar has over ten years of IT solutions experience and 4 years supporting research, biotech, and life sciences. Edgar earned his MS in Environmental science and BS in Biology.

Anthony House
Research Network Engineer a.house@northeastern.edu
Anthony maintains the network connectivity for Northeastern’s Research Computing cluster. He has been designing and engineering networks for over five years. More recently, he has been focused on automating networks with infrastructure as code principles.

Esau Johnson
CMMC Information Security Analyst es.johnson@northeastern.edu
Esau provides support to key compliance programs, in addition to compliance with security standards established by DoD under the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification. He has over eight years of cyber security consultancy supporting federal and private agencies. Esau earned his BS in Economics from the University of Liberia and his MS in Project Management from the University of Phoenix. He achieved several DoD required cybersecurity certificates, including CompTIA Security+, Certified Ethical Hacker, and Certified Information Security Manager.

Manasvita Joshi, PhD
Data Scientist m.joshi@northeastern.edu
Manasvita is responsible for leading cross-functional collaboration and projects. She works actively with research groups to help them design, program, 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.

Tara Ketchem
Documentation, Training & Outreach Specialist t.ketchem@northeastern.edu
Tara is tasked with the 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.

Divya Kottam
ServiceNow Developer/Administrator d.kottam@northeastern.edu
Divya primarily works on the implementation and support of ServiceNow. She works with the Academic Technology and Research Computing teams to perform day-to-day administration of ServiceNow, which includes incident resolution, request fulfillment, working on canvas, services, workflows, integration, and reporting. She has been part of the platform upgrade of ServiceNow and worked on the planning, testing, and change process for this rollout.

Sanna Mumtaz
Research Technology Analyst s.hussain@northeastern.edu
Sanna graduated with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and computer science in 2020. Her responsibilities include receiving technical support requests from researchers from all over the university. She sets up consultations regarding setting up technologies for labs and troubleshoots any technical issues researchers may be facing. She has certification in Microsoft Azure, AWS, and SQL. She works closely with the CX repair team to set up, update and manage research devices including Government Community Cloud High support.

Joseph Robinson, PhD
Machine Learning Performance Engineer j.robinson@northeastern.edu
Joseph is responsible for supporting ML research on the HPC. He works to improve system performance, track experiments, generate publishable results, and optimize the job scheduling on the cluster. Joseph is a double husky (BS, 2014; PhD., 2020). His thesis comprised over 35 peer-reviewed papers on applied ML, computer vision, deep learning, and multimodal. Joseph taught data science at NU and ML at Tufts University. He and Dr. Raymond Fu co-founded AEyeZone, using AI to make construction sites safer.

Greg Shomo
Senior HPC Administrator g.shomo@northeastern.edu
Greg came to Northeastern’s Research Computing team with over 22 years of experience working at TechSquare as a computer consultant and trainer. He specializes in Linux in higher education and research environments. He has also managed high-performance computing resources systems at numerous universities, including MIT, Tufts, and Northeastern for over 20 years.

Bruce Waterbury
OIS Consulting and Education Manager b.waterbury@northeastern.edu
Bruce collaborates with the Northeastern community to advance secure data management and security best practices. He provides support to researchers through individual consultations, workshops, and various other means. Bruce holds his BS in Information Technology from the University of Massachusetts Lowell and is presently pursuing his MS in Cybersecurity at Northeastern’s Khoury College.

Open
HPC Systems Administrator

Open
Research Software Engineer
Student Assistants
Keval Paresh Chheda
Graduate Research Assistant
k.chheda@northeastern.edu
Prasanth Dwadasi
Graduate Research Assistant
p.dwadasi@northeastern.edu
Karan Sunil Joisher
Graduate Research Assistant
k.joisher@northeastern.edu
Keerthana Jaikumar Kolimarla
Assistant Content Developer
k.kolimarla@northeastern.edu
Vrushali Phaltankar
Graduate Research Assistant
v.phaltankar@northeastern.edu
Paarthvi Sharma
Graduate Research Assistant
p.sharma@northeastern.edu
Prajwal Shenoy
Graduate Research Assistant
pr.shenoy@northeastern.edu
Research Computing Student Alumni
Akhil Ajikumar
Rohin Arora
Prasad Bandarkar
Srinjoy Chakravarty
Jiali Cheng
Faustin Combe
Deena Dasarathan
Gaurang Davda
Rhea Dcosta
Aakanksha Duggal
Nitish Tyagi
Sarah Gracia
Khajan Joshi
Nikhil Manikonda
Surya Periaswamy
Girish Pillai
Arjun Prashanth
Sriram Ravindran
Aparna Shelar
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.