UCSC Research & Faculty Partnerships

Basic Facts

•  Three FTE

–  Brad Smith; Director, PhD Computer Engineering

–  Jim Warner; Network Engineer, PhD Chemistry

–  Shawfeng Dong; Project Scientist, PhD Astrophysics

•  Report to Vice Chancellor for Information Technology

•  Goals

–  Tactical: Work with faculty to facilitate their research with IT –  Strategic: Break out of the zero-sum-game model of IT

– Grow the pie rather than get a bigger share of it…

– “Fund” vs cost center…

 

Services We Provide

•  Research support projects –  Opportunistic

Help with operational projects as available

–  RFPs –  Engineering projects

•  Research and teaching

–  Go native…

 

Challenges & Directions

•  Need more people with broader expertise… –  Arts, Social Sciences, Humanities…

–  “Research Liaison”

–  Variation on postdoc model..?

•  Need more IT tools to draw from…

–  On demand L2 circuits

–  Other tricks with SDN? (Hammer looking for nails)

–  More user-friendly cloud services?

–  I’m sure many more…

–  Desired properties… general service, broad application