I am a leader in scientific computing with over 15 years of experience and have acquired deep knowledge and expertise in scientific software and computing infrastructure.

High Energy Physics (HEP) requires very large amounts of computing resources to analyze simulations and data recorded by the detectors. I have extensive experience in planning, developing, and operating distributed computing infrastructures that provide access to several hundred-thousand computing cores and hundreds of petabytes of disk space and tape. I am intimately familiar with scientific grid sites, academic and commercial clouds and the largest U.S. supercomputers. I am also an expert in object-oriented software development, statistical data analysis methods and Monte Carlo simulation techniques as well as various optimization and machine learning techniques.

I am part of a worldwide community process to prepare the software and computing infrastructure for the High Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC, 2029), which will require many times the computing resources of today’s LHC. I was co-author for the overview white paper of the community and was co-editor of the topical white paper about the future of data analysis in High Energy Physics. My expertise in the community was acknowledged in 2020 when I was asked to co-lead the Computational Frontier of the Particle Physics Snowmass 2021 process, the particle physics community planning exercise to document a scientific vision for the future of particle physics in the U.S. and its international partners.

I held many management positions within the international CMS collaboration and at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, supervising up to 100 individuals across many time zones. In March 2019, I was appointed U.S. CMS Software and Computing Operations Program manager overseeing the U.S. CMS Tier-1 and Tier-2 facilities as well as software maintenance and development efforts for core software, computing infrastructure software and analysis systems. The operations program receives both funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Department of Energy (DOE). In this context, I am working together with DOE and NSF and partners at the universities and other labs to enable analysis of LHC particle collisions in the U.S. for the CMS collaboration, and prepare for HL-LHC. To plan the R&D needed for HL-LHC, I co-authored a strategic plan outlining four grand challenges. For Fermilab, I created the Computing Resources Evolution STrategy (CREST) process. The goal is to document a strategy for the evolution of Fermilab’s computing resources in the light of current experiment needs and future anticipated needs of DUNE and HL-LHC with a planning horizon of 10 years.

I regularly speak at international conferences and workshops and am a member of the editorial board of the journal for Computing and Software for Big Science.

I am a particle physicist at heart and my original motivation in the field came from conducting leading edge research for New Physics Beyond the Standard Model of Particle Physics as well as precision Standard Model measurements.

I have multiple years of experience in analyzing high-energy collisions at different particle colliders using a multitude of different techniques. I have published many papers in leading journals and am currently a member of the CMS collaboration that is operating one of the 4 detectors at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. The CMS collaboration spans the whole globe and encompasses more than 3000 physicists from more than 50 countries out of which over 1000 are students. In my former studies at the LHC, I have led searches for evidence of physics beyond the Standard Model using top quarks, and contributed to searches for Supersymmetry and Dark Matter. One of my most noticeable publications is the Observation of the Higgs Boson in 2012, where my work in scientific computing had a significant impact.

published on: 01. November 2024