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