The CAREERS (Cyberteam to Advance Research and Education in Eastern Regional Schools) CyberTeam Program is a 3-year workforce development initiative funded by the National Science Foundation to build a regional pool of Research Computing Facilitators (RCF) to support researchers at small and midsized institutions in Connecticut, Delaware, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island. RCFs are experts at figuring out how to match the right computational resources to the task at hand, something that can stymie researchers who are, for example, sifting through billions of records to find a specific pattern of genes that correlates with a particular form of cancer; or examining massive quantities of sensor data to understand movements of the sea floor; or modeling complex molecular structures. When computing needs exceed the capacity of the researcher’s laptop, the RCF’s role is to help make use of local, regional, and national high-performance computing resources to meet the researcher’s needs.
URI is the anchor institution for CAREERS in Rhode Island and this academic year ’23 — ’24 is leading 12 distinct research projects within this program in a wide variety of disciplines. This effort is aiding new computational research while training student RCFs in the region. The full project listing appears below.
College of Arts & Sciences
• Dr. Fang Wang and student RCF Matt Paolella: Quantum mechanical simulation of fluorine-containing biomolecule
• Dr. Michael Puerrer and student RCF Sam Clyne: Waveform Systematics for Black Hole Binary Mergers Models
College of Engineering
• Dr. Ash Giri and student RCF Jaymes Dionne: Developing machine learning interatomic potentials for classical molecular dynamics simulations of complex perovskites
• Dr. Angelo Lucia and student RCF Eason Chen: Does HPC Offer Advantages in Metabolic Network Modeling, Simulation and Optimization?
• Dr. Liqun Zhang and student RCF Cole Pepin: Steered Molecular Dynamics Simulations on Human beta Defensin Crossing
College of Environment and Life Sciences
• Dr. Ying Zhang and student RCF Aidan McCrillis: Computational pipelines for the analysis of plastic-degrading genes
Graduate School of Oceanography
• Dr. Yang Shen and student RCF Zhangbao Cheng: Improving earthquake detection and localization with deep learning
• Dr. Kei Inomura and student RCF Gabrielle Armin: Biogeochemical cycling consequences due to the impacts on the cellular response to warming oceans
• Dr. Tetsu Hara and student RCF Josh Port: Effects of wind-wave misalignment on air-sea momentum flux and drag coefficient
• Dr. Matt Wei and student RCF Lingchao He: Numerical simulation of earthquake cycles on oceanic transform faults
College of Health Sciences
• Dr. Maya Vadiveloo and student RCF Anthony Francisco: Development of personalized healthy food incentives to improve diet and cardiovascular risk
• Dr. Manshu Yang and student RCF Elizabeth Pauley: An Evaluation of Methods for Handling Missing Data in Randomized Controlled Trials with Omitted Moderation Effects
Computational projects are being funded in nearly all major Colleges at URI and the outcome of these efforts will result in a growth in computational research all across the university. This research work will be supported by URI’s new UNITY computational infrastructure at the Massachusetts Green HPC Center.
“I’m really excited to have helped enable such a diverse array of computational research at URI while also contributing towards workforce development in the region and nationally.” said Dr. Gaurav Khanna who is the Rhode Island PI of this NSF program and also the Director for the URI Center for Computational Research and ITS Research Computing.