Scientific Outreach and DEI Lead in the
Discovery Partner Institute
University of Illinois Chicago
Visiting Research Professor in the HUBzero team
University of California, San Diego
Member of the Leadership team in the program
National Model for Long-Term Support of High-Potential Kids in Unstable Housing
Chicago Hopes for Kids, 4 Foundations Division
My research focuses on science gateways, computational workflows as well as distributed and parallel computing which inherently leads to highly interdisciplinary projects. I am the DPI Team Lead on the Wastewater Epidemiology project, for example. I am especially interested in sustainability of research software, usability of computational methods and reproducibility of research results and I support open science initiatives, i.e., I am an academic editor of PeerJ Computer Science and Frontiers. Sustainability of research software has many facets and I advocate for improving career paths for research software engineers and facilitators and for incentivizing their work via means beyond the traditional academic rewarding system. Community outreach and interdisciplinary events are crucial to contribute to changing academic culture. Thus, I am a founding steering committee member of the US Research Software Engineer Association (US-RSE) and the founder of the IWSG series (International Workshop on Science Gateways) with its first event in 2009 and I have guided since. I am also passionate about increasing diversity in STEM. The program with Chicago Hopes for Kids, for example, supports children with high potential (ages 5-11 as starting point) living in unstable housing.
Prior to the position at DPI, I was an associate research professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering and a computational scientist in the Center for Research Computing at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, US. Before I moved to the US, I was a research associate in the Data-Intensive Research Group at the University of Edinburgh, UK, in the area of data-intensive workflows and in the Applied Bioinformatics Group at the University of Tübingen, Germany, in the area of science gateways and grid computing. Additionally, I have perennial experience as a project manager and system developer in industry in the US and Germany. As head of a system programmer group, I have led long-term software projects (e.g. infrastructure on web-based applications). I received my German diploma (equivalent to a Master’s degree) in computer science from extramural studies at the FernUniversität Hagen and my PhD in computer science from the University of Tübingen, Germany.
Besides the lists on my website, you can find my publications also here.
Google Scholar – ResearchGate