SBGrid History and Staff:
SBGrid was established in 1999 by Piotrek Sliz, currently an Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical School. In its original form, SBGrid integrated the computing environments of structural biology laboratories at Harvard University, Children’s Hospital Boston and Yale Medical School. By 2005, SBGrid had expanded to include more then 30 laboratories.
As of April 2010, SBGrid supports more than 130 member labs in six countries. In spite of our growth, SBGrid still remains a small IT organization funded exclusively by our member laboratories. The SBGrid Consortium operates as a non-profit service center which is hosted by the Department of Biological Chemistry and Macromolecular Pharmacology at Harvard Medical School.
SBGrid Consortium Staff
All SBGrid activities are coordinated by Piotrek Sliz, Ph.D., who is involved in all aspects of operation. Piotrek is a primary investigator and the director of the National Science Foundation Research Coordination Center for Structural Biology Computing. As a faculty member in Harvard Medical School Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology Department, Piotrek is involved in numerous teaching and research activities. His crystallography group is involved in collaborative projects with Suzanne Walker (microbiology) and Richard Gregory (Children's Hospital Boston). In recognition of his vision to establish SBGrid, Piotr has been recently recognized by a prestigous Apple's Excellence in Science award.
Ben Eisenbraun, B.A is the philosopher-cum-software-engineer responsible for maintaining and improving the SBGrid Software Suite. He acts as the primary support contact for users of the software collection in SBGrid member labs. Ben started using and administering UNIX machines in 1999, spent several years working in wide area networking and has discovered the meaning of life, which he uses as his SSH key.
Vitali Vashkevich is our billing coordinator and responsible for managing the SBGrid accounts. Vitali is currently an undergraduate student in the Harvard College Economics program.
SBGrid Core Staff
Ian Levesque, M.S.E joined our team in April 2005 with four years of system administration experience at Harvard Medical School. In addition to managing the high-level UNIX infrastructure for the HHMI structural biology laboratory of Stephen C Harrison, Ian is an accomplished webmaster (www.sbgrid.org, cmcd.med.harvard.edu, crystal.harvard.edu, walz.med.harvard.edu). Ian recently has been working on redesigning storage and authentication infrastructure, and supporting various scientific applications.
Stephen Jahl is a Research System Administrator II. He acts as the front-line contact with all local laboratories subscribing to system administration services (SBGrid Core). His duties include technical support, systems troubleshooting and deployment services. Stephen recently completed his Bachelor's in Psychology and is looking to further his career in the field of Human-Computer Interaction.
NEBioGrid Staff
Ian Stokes-Rees, Ph.D. is an expert in large scale grid architectures, having worked in particle physics computing during his Ph.D. at Oxford, and computational finance, while at INRIA Sophia (France) during a postdoc. He will be establishing a grid infrastructure to enable SBGrid members to easily run a range of software packages through web interfaces, while utilizing computing resources from around the world. His specific interests are in RESTful models for generic computational grids. He is also an expert consultant in the ETSI Grid Specialist Task Force, comissioned by the European Union, where he advises on the state of the art in grid standards and interoperability. Currently Ian works on a separate project to establish a high performance computing portal for structural biology. The project is funded by the National Science Foundation.
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