Our community

Mentors, lecturers, educators, founders, anyone who works with us: we call you “our community”.

Aaron Tohuvavohu

Aaaron Tohuvavohu is a PhD candidate in astrophysics at the University of Toronto.

His research focuses on multi-messenger astrophysics (with light, gravitational waves, and occasionally neutrinos), and anomalous explosive transients. Generally he is interested in using high-energy astrophysical phenomena as probes of fundamental physics. To enable this, we need more data!

He splits his time between developing novel sensitive techniques for joint analysis of astrophysical data from different messengers (combining light and gravitational waves), and on designing and building systems for rapid-response space telescopes to help find and characterize these explosive phenomena.

These days you will find Aaron in the lab building a high-performance, low cost, UV space camera slated for launch soon.

Abby Wilson

Abby Wilson is a recent graduate from Bard College where she received her bachelor’s degree in Chemistry. Her thesis explored the synthesis of vinylogous amide target molecules for the creation of 4-membered carbon rings using visible light-mediated photochemistry. Abby has also conducted research for Gilead Sciences’s process chemistry department where she investigated the applications of Multi-Objective Bayesian Optimization for determining ideal reaction conditions. Her research interests include organic synthesis, catalysis, the construction of bio-active molecules, and the intersection of computation and chemistry. Abby is a mentor and lecturer at the Institute for Computing in Research.

Agnes Chavez

How can the merging of art, science and technology develop empathy and new approaches to humanitarian and ecological challenges?

Agnes Chavez is an interdisciplinary artist and educator whose work integrates art, science and technology as tools for social and environmental change. Her work integrates data visualization, light, sound and space to create sensorial experiences that seek balance between nature and technology.  She is the founder of STEMarts Lab, which delivers sci-art installations and STEAM programming for schools, art/science organizations and festivals. STEMarts Lab produces the STEMarts Curriculum Tool, an online platform that complements sci-art festivals and events with STEAM teacher resources built around the work of curated artists. She has developed STEAM programs for ATLAS@CERN, Scholastic, 516 Arts, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and for the ISEA2012 electronic arts festival. In 2014 she co-founded The PASEO outdoor participatory art festival in Taos New Mexico, whose mission is to transform community through art and art through community. She developed the SUBE, Language through Art, Music & Games program, now in its 24th year, which won her numerous awards including the “Educational Innovation in the Americas” (INELAM) award and the New Mexico Women in Technology Award. Agnes is a mentor at the Institute for Computing in Research.

(Download Agnes Chavez CV)

Alan Cleary

Alan Cleary is a computational research scientist and senior software engineer at the National Center for Genome Resources.

A Computer Scientist by training, Dr. Cleary’s research interests lie at the intersection of math, computer science, and software engineering with applications in computational biology. His primary area of interest is computational pangenomics, which is concerned with algorithms and data-structures for pangenome representation, construction, and analysis. Dr. Cleary’s own work includes the development of algorithms to enable pangenome analysis at scale as well as the application of machine learning to make associations between complex pangenome structure and phenotypic traits. Dr. Cleary also works on the Legume Information System. This work primarily involves the development and implementation of real-time federated algorithms for computing synteny between closely related legume species housed in a variety of geographically distributed data stores maintained by independently funded groups.

Albert Kerelis

Albert Kerelis is an undergraduate English major at Reed College. Their main area of study is 20th century American fiction, and they have begun work on their senior thesis on Ralph Ellison and his novel, Invisible Man. Other areas of study include political theory and continental philosophy. At Reed they produced the Burn Your Draft podcast, which interviewed Reed alums about their theses, and were head editor of the school’s newspaper, The Quest. Albert is a co-director of the Research Skills Academy.

Amanda Madden

Amanda Madden is a research physicist in the Space Science and Applications group in Los Alamos National Laboratory, where she works on neutron imaging and nuclear nonproliferation. Amanda has a PhD in physics from the University of New Hampshire and a bachelor’s degree in physics and mathematics from SUNY Oneonta. When not doing scientific work Amanda plays the viola in the Eternal Summer String Orchestra and the Los Alamos Symphony Orchestra, and spends as much time skiing as possible. Amanda is a lecturer at the Institute for Computing in Research.

Amanda Ziemann

Amanda Ziemann is a research scientist in the Space Data Science and Systems Group at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Her main areas of research are data science and signal detection, primarily applied to multispectral and hyperspectral remote sensing of the earth. Amanda holds a bachelor’s degree in Mathematics, a master’s degree in Applied and Computational Mathematics, and a Ph.D. in Imaging Science, all from the Rochester Institute of Technology. Her most recent research has focused on data fusion using remote sensing imagery along with non-traditional data streams (like social media and weather) for applications ranging anywhere from mosquito-borne disease forecasting to national security. Amanda is a lecturer at the Institute for Computing in Research.

Ameeta Agrawal

Dr. Ameeta Agrawal is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science in the Maseeh College of Engineering and Computer Science at Portland State University. Dr. Agrawal’s primary areas of research include natural language processing, machine learning, and computational social science.

Her current work focuses on unsupervised learning, fairness in computational models, affect analysis (e.g., sentiment, emotion and sarcasm) and knowledge graphs. She is also interested in exploring real-world applications of her research, and some of her recent projects include analyzing early indicators of population displacement and covid-19 patterns from social media data. Dr. Agrawal is the director of the NLP lab at Portland State University, and she received her MSc. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from York University in Canada. Ameeta Agrawal is a mentor at the Institute for Computing in Research in Portland.

Art Barnes

Art Barnes is a research engineer at Los Alamos National Laboratory focused on research improving the resilience of the electrical grid. His work uses new technologies and techniques such as the application of grid-connected power electronics. Tools to intelligently allocate and operate these resources in the grid include linear, nonlinear, and stochastic optimization methods, statistical pattern recognition, classical and modern control systems.

Art Barnes has his Bachelor’s degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from University of Colorado at Boulder, his Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering from University of Florida, and his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Univerity of Arkansas. Art is a mentor at the Institute for Computing in Research.

Ashley Teufel

Ashley Teufel is a biologist, computer scientist and mathematician at the Santa Fe Institute

All of biological life is the result of simple biochemical reactions and the diversity of life that we see today has been ~3.5 billion years in the making. Although, over most of this time the biosphere was dominated by prokaryotic and unicellular species. A dramatic shift in the complexity of life occurred ~0.55 billion years ago, and all the major groups of multicellular animals begin to appear in the fossil record. The goal of Ashley’s research is to uncover how the physio-chemical laws that govern all biochemical reactions led to the emergence and expansion of complex life. Using a combination of computational and theoretical approaches Ashley’s research is focused on the functional diversification of biological systems across multiple layers of organization. Thus far her research has centered on the evolution of proteins, duplicated genes, and metabolic pathways. In her future work, she plans to continue to study these molecular systems while also extending her work to examine how changing environments and ecological interactions further shape functional diversification.

Prior to joining SFI, Ashley was a postdoctoral researcher at The University of Texas at Austin in the Department of Integrative Biology. She holds a Ph.D. in Molecular Biology from The University of Wyoming, and B.S. degrees in Computer Science and Mathematics from New Mexico State University. Ashley is a lecturer and mentor at the Institute for Computing in Research.

Bart Massey

Bart Massey’s research interests are quite broad, but all contain an emphasis on open source technology development and software engineering. Some of his research is around applications of search and machine learning in autonomous systems, planning and scheduling, and one- and two-player games.

Bart received a B.A. in Physics from Reed College, worked in the TV Measurement Systems group at Tektronix as a DSP programmer and a systems, languages, and tools expert. He then received as M.S. in Computer Science from University of Oregon, working in concurrent logic programming language implementation. He then was awarded a Ph.D. from the University of Oregon Computational Intelligence Research Laboratory.

Bart has also been involved in the development of the X Window System, and in the Portland State Aerospace Society, taking a strong interest in advanced amateur avionics.

Bart is a mentor at the Institute for Computing in Research in Portland.

Cathy Plesko

Cathy Plesko is a Research Scientist in Applied Physics at Los Alamos National Laboratory. She uses the supercomputers there to study what happens when asteroids and comets hit a planet and how to prevent them from hitting Earth. She was a teenager when she became interested in asteroids and comets. Cathy was awarded her Ph.D. in Geophysics and Planetary Sciences in 2009. That was at UC Santa Cruz where she studied the effects that large asteroid and comet impacts had on the climate of Mars early in the history of the solar system. She has also studied asteroid impact mitigation, and uses those supercomputers to model how a nuclear explosion might deflect an asteroid just enough to miss our home planet. Cathy is a lecturer at the Institute for Computing in Research.

Caz Barnum

Caz Barnum is a history candidate at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Although his research centers on the 16th Century Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire, Caz enjoys all things history, especially uncovering and exploring original source documents. Caz was bitten by the teaching bug during an experience helping out in a high school U.S. history summer course. Since that time he has sought different ways to help others discover the fascinating and incredible stories hidden in the pages of history. Caz Barnum is a mentor at the Institute for Computing in Research.

Cole Agard

Cole Agard is a graduate data science student at the University of California, Berkeley and a seasoned machine learning engineer. Cole’s latest research focuses on Large Language Model assisted automated Machine Learning to reduce developer introduced bias. He also holds a keen interest in cloud technologies and developing open-source solutions. Some of his recent experiences involved enhancing high-throughput screening efficiency for pharmaceutical development and predicting animal illness indicators through supervised machine learning models. Cole’s deep-rooted passion for technological advancement continues to drive his exploration and innovation in the realm of machine learning and data science. Cole is a mentor at the Institute for Computing in Research.

Cyrus Kirkman

Cyrus Kirkman is a PhD candidate in Behavioral Neuroscience at the University of California, Los Angeles. He primarily explores various methodologies to better quantify behavior in animal and plant models; this can range from using touchscreens to track spatial distributions of pigeon pecks to constructing photo-based pipelines to measure plant stimulus-response patterns. Other research interests include learning theory, behavioral economics, and comparative cognition. Cyrus is from Santa Fe, New Mexico and earned his Bachelor’s degree in psychology from Reed College (2020). Cyrus is a mentor and lecturer at the Institute for Computing in Research.

Daphne Kurzenhauser

Daphne Kurzenhauser is a graduate student at Portland State University currently working in research on passive SPAD (single-photon avalanche diode) imaging at PSU’s Computational Imaging Lab. A dual masters student in mathematics and computer science, Daphne is interested in the intersection points between the two fields, with particular emphasis on optimization theory, algorithms, and algebraic and number theoretical methods for cryptography and quantum computing. As an early college student, she has an appreciation and passion for pedagogy and educational outreach.

Outside of academics, Daphne is a classically trained pianist and enjoys cinema, climbing, and literature. Daphne is a mentor at the Institute for Computing in Research.

David Higginson

David Higginson has dedicated more than 25 years to children’s health care and joined Phoenix Children’s in 2011 as the Chief Information Officer (CIO). As CIO, he oversaw all aspects of information technology strategy, project execution, systems design, and technology infrastructure maintenance. Phoenix Children’s implemented a fully integrated EMR, Billing, and ancillary clinical systems with a single database and product line integration under his direction. Before transitioning to his current role as Chief Innovation Officer in 2020, David served as Phoenix Children’s Chief Operating Officer beginning in 2018, where he was responsible for Nursing, Operations, Information Technology, Supply Chain, Process Optimization and Marketing.

Higginson is an innovator and entrepreneur. He successfully launched and developed his own health care software company, commercialized numerous innovations into patents and successful products and is passionate about operational efficiency and process improvement. He regularly speaks at health care conferences on the evolving role of technology as the efficiency platform underpinning care delivery and the importance of operationalizing the insights provided by data in the EMR. In 2016, Higginson was named “CHIME Innovator of the Year” and was awarded AZ Top Tech’s “CIO of the Year” in 2017 and the Phoenix Children’s IT department has twice been recognized as the Best Healthcare IT department in the US.

Before taking his position at Phoenix Children’s, Higginson was Chief Information Technology Officer at Arkansas Children’s Hospital (ACH) in Little Rock. During his 16-year tenure at ACH, he implemented more than 500 systems and was instrumental in building the IT and research departments as the hospital doubled in size.

After obtaining his degree in accounting/finance from the University of Liverpool in the United Kingdom, he qualified as a Chartered Management Accountant in 1994 while working as an investment analyst in London. At the age of 10, he began developing computer systems. He combined his keen interest in computing with his financial expertise when he developed systems for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the UK’s Royal Mail. David is a mentor at the Institute for Computing in Research.

David Palmer

David Palmer received his PhD in Physics from the California Institute of Technology for gamma ray observations of Supernova 1987A from a balloon-borne telescope. Since then he has worked at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and at Los Alamos National Laboratory. He has worked on gamma ray astronomical spacecraft including Compton GRO, the TGRS instrument on WIND, and Swift. He was part of the initial proposing team on Swift, and developed the on-board scientific analysis software for its BAT instrument. He has since applied the skills learned with individual gamma ray photons to the optical regime, five orders of magnitude down in energy. David is a lecturer and mentor at the Institute for Computing in Research.

Ed Fenimore

Ed Fenimore received his PhD from the University of Chicago and spent his career at Los Alamos as an astrophysicist, mostly studying gamma-ray bursts, which are the birth of black holes and can be seen across the Universe, and the nonproliferation of nuclear weapons. Appointed a Laboratory Fellow in 1998, Fenimore has won the Los Alamos Distinguished Performance Award nine times as well as the Los Alamos Distinguished Mentor Award. He was a member of the 2007 team that won the Rossi Prize, the highest honor in high-energy astrophysics research. He was the lead LANL scientist on several satellites including the Swift satellite, launched by NASA in 2004 and still producing major scientific results. He currently splits his so-called retirement between working at Los Alamos, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and volunteering at elementary schools. Ed is a lecturer and mentor at the Institute for Computing in Research.

Emma Goldberg

Emma Goldberg is a theoretical biologist now working in epidemiology. She uses various kinds of mathematical and statistical modeling, especially phylogenetics, to understand evolutionary processes and the spread of infectious disease.

Emma Goldberg is a research scientist in the Theoretical Biology group in Los Alamos National Laboratory. She holds a PhD from University of California San Diego, and has been a researcher at University of Illinois Chicago and a professor in the Ecology, Evolution and Behavior department at the University of Minnesota.

Grant Meadors

Grant David Meadors is a Research Scientist in the Space Data Science and Systems group in Los Alamos National Laboratory.  On his way to Los Alamos:

After a Senior Reactor Operator license and 2008 BA from Reed College, Grant earned his 2014 PhD in physics from the University of Michigan. His research included a LIGO Fellowship on filtering noise using feedforward subtraction and helping build a quantum-optical squeezer, alongside outreach at the World Science Festival & LaserFest. He also was a data-analysis challenge winner. A 2015-2017 postdoc at AEI Hannover (the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics) yielded computational acceleration and statistical improvements to frequentist searches for continuous gravitational waves from binary neutron stars. A 2018-2019 Monash University postdoc in Australia contributed to Bayesian inference, while serving on the OzGrav Early Career Researcher and Equity & Diversity Committees. He was an internal reviewer for LIGO Scientific Collaboration analyses and is a coauthor on almost a hundred publications.

Before joining his current group in Los Alamos, Grant worked in the Computational Physics division, with work ranging from bringing software carpentry and the diversity working group to the division, to theoretical biology, to particle-filter optimization of solar-wind physics models from NASA, and inertial confinement fusion.

Grant is a lecturer and mentor at the Institute for Computing in Research.

Helena Miton

Helena’s research agenda approaches culture as an emergent effect of human everyday life. It aims to understand how individuals interact to produce, organize and transmit cultural systems. Aiming to redefine how we study culture, her research program includes both theoretical advances and empirical case studies. She studies cultural evolution using data from human and social sciences, with a strong emphasis on cognitive science. She plans on investigating how characteristics of small-scale interactions can impact cultural productions at larger scales, in the context of both technical knowledge and economic practices. 

In her previous works, she has reviewed cultural transmission experiments in an attempt to bridge back these experiments and the theoretical constructs they aim to test, tested hypotheses on how maladaptative medical practices (e.g., bloodletting) can thrive, and on how complexity evolves in graphic communication systems (e.g., heraldry, writing).

Helena received her PhD in Cognitive Science from the Central European University (Budapest, Hungary). Prior to that, she earned a M.S in Cognitive Science from the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, and Paris Descartes University, and a B.A. in Sociology from Paris Sorbonne University.

Ignacio (Nacho) de la Higuera

Nacho de la Higuera is a research scientist in the Extreme Virus Lab, in the Portland State University biology department. His research interests include the evolution and structure of cruciviruses and viruses of extremophilic archaea. His major interest is to understand the origin and evolution of life, and how virus are involved in this process.

Nacho de la Higuera holds bachelor’s degrees from Swansea University and the Universidad de Granada, a master’s degree in cell and molecular biology from the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, and a PhD in molecular biology from the Universitad Autonoma de Madrid. Nacho is a mentor at the Institute for Computing in Research in Portland.

Henrik Olsson

Henrik Olsson is an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. He is a cognitive scientist studying decision making, judgment under uncertainty, social cognition, categorization, and visual perception. A recurrent theme in his research is the development of new psychological theories and the use of formal mathematical models to try to understand the underlying psychological processes. Another theme is the ecological perspective. To understand adaptive behavior, we must consider how the environment, social or physical, is structured and how psychological processes exploit, or fail to exploit, these structures. Henrik’s current work focuses on understanding how properties of individual decision strategies and social network structures affect group performance by connecting research in social cognition and decision making with insights from statistics and machine learning. Henrik is a lecturer and mentor at the Institute for Computing in Research.

Jason Schaefer

Jason Schaefer is the founder and owner of Schaefer IT Consulting, a high-end IT consulting business deeply rooted in free/open-source software. Jason also has a strong interest in security, privacy, and digital freedoms. Jason is a lecturer and mentor at the Institute for Computing in Research.

Jerawan Armstrong

Jerawan Armstrong is a research scientist in the Monte Carlo group at Los Alamos National Laboratory. She is an MCNP (Monte Carlo N-Particle) transport code developer. Her research focuses on developing algorithms and computational codes for radiation transport applications. Jerawan received her PhD in Mathematics from Virginia Tech. Jerawan is a mentor at the Institute for Computing in Research.

Jim Davies

Jim Davies (http://www.jimdavies.org/) is a professor at the Department of Cognitive Science at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario. He is the author of Imagination: The Science of Your Mind’s Greatest Power and Riveted: The Science of Why Jokes Make us Laugh, Movies Make us Cry, and Religion Makes us Feel One with the Universe, and Being the Person Your Dog Thinks You Are: The Science of a Better You. He co-hosts (with Dr. Kim Hellemans) the award-winning podcast Minding the Brain. Director of the Science of Imagination Laboratory, he explores processes of visualization in humans and machines and specializes in artificial intelligence, analogy, problem-solving, and the psychology of art, religion, and creativity. 

In his spare time, he is a published poet, game designer, and fiction writer, an internationally-produced playwright, and a professional artist and calligrapher. His sister is novelist JD Spero.

http://www.jimdavies.org/

Joann Mudge

Joann Mudge works on structural genomics, studying how genomes are organized and how genome structure affects gene expression, phenotypes, and genomic plasticity. Her main area of focus is in plant genetics, especially of nitrogen-fixing species in the bean and pea family (legumes). Her current projects include de novo sequencing, assembly and analysis of multiple genomes in Medicago truncatula and its relative, alfalfa. She also has a project on pangenomics algorithm development and is applying these algorithms to gain biological insights in multi-genome datasets, including Medicago truncatula. In addition, she works in the area of plant microbiomes, especially looking at plant/fungal interactions that buffer plant growth against abiotic stressors and implications for climate change. Joann has also worked in human genomics, playing a major role in the sequencing of the 6th ever human genome (of a Korean individual) and of female monozygotic twins discordant for multiple sclerosis. Joann is also dedicated to outreach and helping the upcoming generation to develop an interest in science. An NIH-supported project allows her to work with elementary and secondary education teachers to teach them about genomics and bioinformatics and to help them develop computer-based case studies for their classrooms. She also has an innovative high school intern program in which she works with high school students, teaching them about DNA sequencing and bioinformatics and helping them to develop case studies. She regularly visits schools and science fairs to teach and promote science. Joann is a lecturer and mentor at the Institute for Computing in Research.

Johnny Powell

Johnny Powell is a professor of Physics at Reed College. After graduating from Cal State Northridge in the 1970s, Johnny taught for three years with the Peace Corps in Malaysia, then going on to get his PhD at Arizona State University. In his long career Johnny has worked on a variety of areas in astrophysics and biophysics, including galactic dynamics and cosmological n-body simulations. He has mentored more than 70 physics theses at Reed College, and when not doing research he is an avid traveler, bird-watcher, and athlete. Johnny Powell is a mentor and guest lecturer at the Institute for Computing in Physics.

Juan Carlos Cornejo

Juan Carlos Cornejo is a research scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory. He received his Ph.D. in Physics from The College of William & Mary, where he focused on measuring the “weak” charge of the Proton. He was a frequent collaborator in many experiments in Jefferson Lab, performing particle detector R&D, developing scientific software, data acquisitions for large scale experiments, and analyzing the vast amounts of data collected. These days he has shifted his interests to space based detector technologies. He has always been passionate about Open Source, Open Science and lately exploring the world of Open Hardware. Juan Carlos is a mentor at the Institute for Computing in Research.

Kara Becker

Kara Becker is Associate Professor of Linguistics at Reed College. Kara is a sociolinguist, a variationist, and a dialectologist, whose scholarship concerns regional and social varieties of American English. Kara received a B.A. in Linguistics and an M.A. in Educational Linguistics from Stanford University, and Ph.D. in Linguistics from New York University. She joined the Reed faculty in 2010, and teaches courses on language and society, including Dialects of English, Contact Languages, Language, Sex, Gender and Sexuality, and African American English. Kara talks often to the media about linguistic diversity in the U.S., most commonly about the New York City dialect, but also about West Coast dialects (recent article). More information on Kara’s research interests, teaching, and media presence can be found on her website.

Karina Higginson

Karina Higginson is obtaining her English Degree from Reed College. Passionate about social justice and the power of words, Karina has been long involved with creating and advocating for state legislation through programs such as Youth And Government with the YMCA in highschool, and Reed College’s Sexual Health, Advocacy, and Relationship Education program. Working as an educator and safety patrol with SHARE at Reed, Karina is dedicated to the well-being and safety of her community. Her experience teaching kids comes from her time as a taekwondo instructor, in which she was the highest ranking woman at her studio, and won state titles in competitions. In academic’s, she explores questions of the human experience and the phenomenology of words. Passionate about classic literature, Karina also enjoys reading and writing poetry. Her other interests include listening to music, playing guitar, dance, visual art, and theater. Karina is co-director of the Research Skills Academy.

Kim Babiarz

Kim Babiarz is a Research Scholar in Health Policy at Stanford University. Dr. Babiarz’s research focuses on fertility and family planning programs, infant and maternal health, and the gender dynamics of global health. She has studied human trafficking in China and South East Asia, and currently works on quantitative approaches to issues of human trafficking and child labor in Brazil. Dr. Babiarz specializes in large-scale program evaluations and quasi-experimental study designs. She holds a PhD in Agricultural and Resource Economics from the University of California, Davis (2011). Kim Babiarz is a mentor and lecturer at the Institute for Computing in Research.

Konstantin Borozdin

Experienced scientist, technical leader, and innovator, Konstantin Borozdin was trained as an experimental nuclear physicist and started his research career in Moscow at Space Research Institute, as an astrophysicist studying black holes and neutron stars. At the end of last century he moved to the United States and became one of the original inventors of a novel muon tomography technique at Los Alamos National Laboratory. He continued his career in industry, as Vice President for Analytics and Strategic Development at Decision Sciences International Corporation. Konstantin has authored over 200 publications, presented at multiple conferences, and holds several US and international patents. He currently serves as Senior VP for Analytics and Software Products at Muon Vision, a Cambridge-based company, where he leads the development of advanced imaging solutions for a more efficient and safer mining industry. His professional interests range from astrophysics and cosmology to non-destructive 3D imaging, machine learning and AI. Konstantin is a lecturer and mentor at the Institute for Computing in Research.

Leina Gries

Leina Gries is a student at Pomona College, where she plans to study computer science and biology in pursuit of a career in computational biology. Leina has a strong interest in researching the connections between computing and the natural sciences and has been a co-developer of the “Serious programming – small courses” curriculum and textbook with Mark Galassi. A graduate of Santa Fe’s Desert Academy, Leina is the recipient of the Los Alamos National Laboratory foundation Gold Scholarship, and is also Desert Academy’s 2019 Valedictorian. When not doing scientific work, Leina can be found volunteering with an equine therapy program, dancing, tutoring, or caring for her many fish. Leina is a co-founder and alumna of the Institute for Computing in Research.

Lucho Ionkov

Latchesar (Lucho) Ionkov is a research scientist in the High Performance Computing (HPC) Division at Los Alamos National Laboratory. His interests span from HPC systems and storage research to emerging storage media like DNA storage. He received his PhD in Computer Science from UC Santa Cruz. Lucho is involved with the International Science and Engineering Fair as a judge at regional, state and internation level. He is also a mentor for the FIRST Robotics club 4153 in Los Alamos. Lucho is a mentor at the Institute for Computing in Research.

Maria de Hoyos

Maria de Hoyos obtained her bachelor’s degree in Industrial and Systems Engineering from ITESM, Campus Monterrey (Mexico), and her PhD in mathematics education from the University of Warwick (UK). In her career she has taught mathematics at the high school level in Mexico, the UK and the US. She currently teaches AGS (Algebra, Geometry and Statistics) as well as a new course in Data Science at Beaverton School District (Oregon). She has also worked as a researcher, publishing extensively in the areas of mathematics education, employability, and inequality of access. Maria directs the Portland (OR) cohort of the Institute for Computing in Research.

Mark Galassi

Mark Galassi is an astrophysicist and computer scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory. He has worked on the HETE, HETE-2 and Swift satellites, as well as in Los Alamos’s nuclear non-proliferation effort and many other areas of space physics. Passionate about free/open-source software since 1984, he has contributed to the GNU project since then – most notably he designed and led the implementation of the GNU Scientific Library, and has consistently pressed for the use of free/open-source software in scientific research. He also is the chair of the board of the Software Freedom Conservancy.

Raised in Italy studying classics, Mark then got his undergraduate degree in Physics from Reed College (1987), and his PhD in mathematical and computational physics from Stony Brook University (1992). He has been in Los Alamos ever since, except for a two-year sabbatical working for Cygnus (the first free/open-source software company, now part of Red Hat). Mark is a co-founder of the Institute for Computing in Research.

Matt Durrin

Matt Durrin is a cybersecurity expert who manages the incident response and R & D teams at LMG Security. He is an instructor at the international Black Hat USA conference, where he teaches classes on ransomware and data breaches. He regularly conducts cybersecurity webinars and seminars for hundreds of attendees in all sectors, including banking, retail, health care, government and more. A seasoned forensics professional, Matt specializes in incident response, ransomware cases, cryptojacking, and banking trojans. Matt holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science from the University of Montana and previously worked as a “blue team” field technician/system administrator for over 10 years. Matt is a mentor and lecturer at the Institute for Computing in Research.

Melanie Mitchell

Melanie Mitchell is the Davis Professor of Complexity at the Santa Fe Institute, and Professor of Computer Science (currently on leave) at Portland State University. Her current research focuses on conceptual abstraction, analogy-making, and visual recognition in artificial intelligence systems. Melanie is the author or editor of six books and numerous scholarly papers in the fields of artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and complex systems. Her book Complexity: A Guided Tour (Oxford University Press) won the 2010 Phi Beta Kappa Science Book Award and was named by Amazon.com as one of the ten best science books of 2009. Her latest book is Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux). Melanie is a lecturer and mentor at the Institute for Computing in Research.

Michal Kucer

Michal Kucer received his BS in Microelectronic Engineering and Applied Mathematics from the Rochester Institute of Technology (2014), and his PhD in Imaging Sciences at RIT (2020). He is currently a Postdoctoral researcher at the Los Alamos National Laboratory working on problems in computer vision, image retrieval, and machine learning. His doctoral work focused on development of methods for predicting the aesthetic value of images and composition ranking with its application to image enhancement. His broader interests include various topics in Computer Vision, Remote Sensing and Machine Learning. Michal previously completed internships at the LANL in ISR-3 group working on target and anomaly detection, and with Naver Labs Europe working on semantic fashion understanding and fashion image retrieval.

Mirta Galesic

Mirta Galesic is Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, External Faculty at the Complexity Science Hub in Vienna, Austria, and Associate Researcher at the Harding Center for Risk Literacy at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, Germany. She studies how simple cognitive mechanisms interact with properties of the external environment to produce seemingly complex social phenomena. In one line of research, she investigates how apparent cognitive biases in social judgments emerge as a product of the interplay of well-adapted minds and the statistical structure of social environments. In another, she studies how collective performance depend on the interaction of group decision strategies and network structures. A third line of research investigates opinion dynamics in real-world societies using cognitively-enriched models from statistical physics. And, she studies how people understand and cope with uncertainty and complexity inherent in many everyday decisions. Mirta is a lecturer and mentor at the Institute for Computing in Research.

Mitchell Burdorf

Mitchell Burdorf is a research scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he
works on modeling the propagation of radiation in the near-earth space environment, and
on balloon flight experiments. Mitchell’s research interests include any computationally difficult
physics problems. In the past he has also worked on n-body problems. Mitchell
holds a degree in Physics from Reed College, and is a mentor at the Institute for
Computing in Research.

Mohit Dubey

Mohit Dubey, a PhD candidate at University of California at Berkeley, is a scientist, musician, traveller, and educator with research interests in machine learning, environmental science and physics. He is from Los Alamos, NM and holds degrees from Oberlin College (BA/BM), The University of Alicante (Masters in Classical Guitar) and Santa Fe Community College (Teaching License). After graduating college he spent a few years teaching high school science, co-founding a music-tech startup and working at Los Alamos National Laboratory on developing robust machine learning models for analyzing spectroscopic data from laser-ionized Mars rocks. He is now a Environmental Engineering MS/PhD student at UC Berkeley where his research focuses on quantifying methane emissions using novel sensors and modeling techniques.

Mohit Dubey is a mentor and lecturer at the Institute for Computing in Research.

Montreal Benesch

Montreal Benesch is a recent graduate from Reed College with a bachelor’s degree in Linguistics. Their thesis focused on queer sociophonetics and the construction of gender in the speech of genderfluid individuals, while their current project investigates linguistic diversity and discrimination in higher education. They are also a Senior Reactor Operator at the Reed Research Reactor, and as Training Supervisor trained 40+ other students to take the Nuclear Regulatory Commission exam and obtain licenses to operate the reactor. Montreal is a mentor at the Institute for Computing in Research.

Nicole Lloyd Ronning

Nicole Lloyd Ronning is a research scientist at the Center for Theoretical Astrophysics in Los Alamos and a professor at the university of New Mexico, Los Alamos. Nicole was awarded her PhD from Stanford University and has worked on gamma-ray bursts, studying their intrinsic properties as well as their role as cosmological probes. Nicole has been involved with the Swift satellite mission. Nicole also works extensively with outreach to young students and underrepresented groups in New Mexico and worldwide. Nicole is a lecturer and mentor at the Institute for Computing in Research.

Owen Young

Owen Young is a researcher at Los Alamos National Laboratory, with interests in physics, electrical engineering, and computer science. He has worked in quantum optics, and cosmological n-body simulations. Owen holds a degree in Physics from Reed College, and is a mentor and lecturer at the Institute for Computing in Research.

Paige Prescott

Paige Prescott has been involved in Computer Science education for more than twelve years. As Executive Director of the newly formed Computer Science Alliance, she is interested in strengthening the community of people involved computer science education and to advocate on a state, district and local level to see more computer science offerings in New Mexico, especially to the underserved areas in rural and tribal communities. She was executive director of the Supercomputing Challenge from 2020 to 2022.

She has been the President of the Computer Science Teachers Association of New Mexico (CSTA-NM) since 2015 and is pursuing a PhD in Learning Sciences at UNM where she is focusing on computer science education. Paige has trained over 500 teachers to bring computer science to their students K-8 through CS Fundamentals and CS in Science curriculum for Project GUTS. Paige is a co-founder of the Institute for Computing in Research.

Patrick Gasda

Patrick Gasda is a research scientist in the Space Remote Sensing and Data Science group in Los Alamos National Laboratory. Patrick is a member of the team that built and operates the ChemCam and SuperCam instruments on the Mars Perseverance and Curiosity rovers. Patrick’s main interests are in aqueous geochemistry and spectroscopy, and also includes optical design, chemical and spectral modeling, statistics, and machine learning. Patrick holds a bachelor’s degree in Chemistry from Ursinus College and a PhD in Geology from University of Hawaii. Patrick is a mentor at the Institute for Computing in Research.

Pawel Kozlowski

Pawel Kozlowski is a plasma physicist working in the area of high energy density physics research, a field which spans from our understanding of the structure of stellar interiors, to the interactions of supernovae with their environment, to the production of controlled nuclear fusion in laboratory using high energy lasers. His interests are in fielding plasma experiments to study the properties of radiation flows and shocks in these high energy density plasmas, as well as in developing diagnostics and open source available analysis tools for the wider plasma physics community. Pawel holds a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering with a minor in Physics from the University of California, San Diego, and a Doctorate of Philosophy in Atomic & Laser Physics from the University of Oxford. He currently holds a staff scientist position at Los Alamos National Laboratory, and is a contributor to the open source PlasmaPy project.
Pawel is a mentor and lecturer at the Institute for Computing in Research.

Primal Pappachan

Primal Pappachan is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Portland State University. His research interests are in the intersection of data management and privacy. In the past, he has looked at privacy concerns of smartphones and Google Glass. His current research is focused on data protection methods such as access control, differential privacy, inference control, and privacy policies in domains such as the Internet of Things. He envisions a future where privacy is not an afterthought but a fundamental driver in shaping the design and development of all data-management systems.

Prior to joining Portland State University, Primal was a postdoctoral researcher at Pennsylvania State University. He completed his PhD in Computer Science from University of California, Irvine.

Beyond his academic pursuits, Primal enjoys hiking, reading fiction, and playing rogue-likes/lites. Primal is a mentor at the Institute for Computing in Research.

Rachel Hopkins

Rachel Hopkins is an archeologist and data scientist with cross-disciplinary interests in environmental science, anthropology, linguistics, experimental methods (such as radiocarbon dating and material analysis), and statistical modeling. She holds a bachelors degree in Prehistoric Archaeology and Human Ecology from the University of Zurich (Switzerland), and a PhD in Archaeological Science from the University of Oxford (UK). Rachel is passionate about laboratory procedures and advanced software analysis techniques, and has published extensively on archaeological dating applied to the migration of modern humans into Europe. A recipient of the Wenner-Gren Foundation’s Hunt Fellowship in 2020, she currently holds positions at Meow Wolf and the University of New Mexico. Rachel Hopkins is a mentor and lecturer at the Institute for Computing in Research.

Rhonda Crespo

Rhonda Crespo was raised in Kentucky and has lived in Santa Fe for more than twenty years. Upon hearing that there were classes without teachers she quit her job in banking and became a teacher. Rhonda earned her Bachelors degree from NMHU and Masters degree from NM Tech, with an emphasis in Environmental Geology. She is on the faculty of Monte del Sol Charter School, and has taught biology, chemistry, and computer science for seventeen years. She has actively sponsored winning students in Science Fair and the Supercomputing Challenge and was a Golden Apple Nominee in 2011. Rhonda is a co-founder and the executive director of the Institute for Computing in Research.

Robert (Bob) Robey

Robert (Bob) Robey is a Research Scientist in the Computational Physics Division at Los Alamos National Laboratory. He is a co-author of the book Parallel and High-Performance Computing, Manning Publications, 2021. He is a co-founder of the LANL Parallel Computing Summer Research Internships program and prior to that was one of the key contributors to the Computational Physics summer workshop program. He is the lead author of the CLAMR mini-app, an open source adaptive mesh refinement shallow water hydrocode and a half-dozen other open source codes. Some of his interests include parallel algorithm research and computational physics methods research. He has over 30 years of experience in shock wave research including the operation of large explosively driven shock tubes and writing compressible fluid dynamics codes. He helped establish the High Performance Computing Center at the University of New Mexico and the Maui High Performance Computing Center.

Saba Goodarzi

Saba Goodarzi is a physicist and applied mathematician at Los Alamos National Laboratory. His interests range from musical acoustics, where he has written on inharmonic networks of strings and the dynamics of flat bells, to inertial confinement fusion and astrophysics. In addition to his work in Physics, Saba also plays the cello and has taught mathematics at the high school level. Saba holds a degree in Physics from Reed College, and is a mentor and lecturer at the Institute for Computing in Research.

Sherri Davidoff

Sherri Davidoff is the CEO of LMG Security and the author of book “Data Breaches.” As a recognized expert in cybersecurity and data breach response, Sherri has been called a “security badass” by The New York Times. She has conducted cybersecurity training for many distinguished organizations, including the Department of Defense, the American Bar Association, FFIEC/FDIC, and many more.

Sherri is a faculty member at the Pacific Coast Banking School, and an instructor for Black Hat, where she teaches her “Data Breaches” course. She is also the co-author of Network Forensics: Tracking Hackers Through Cyberspace, a noted security text in the private sector and a college textbook for many cybersecurity courses. Sherri is a GIAC-certified forensic examiner (GCFA) and penetration tester (GPEN), and holds her degree in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering from MIT, and has done graduate research in astrophysics at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Sherri’s recent book, Data Breaches: Crisis and Opportunity, gives a glimpse into the high-octane world of data breach disclosure and response, while showing you how to protect your organization before and after a data breach. Since her hacking days at MIT, where she was known as “Alien” and ran her first real-world social engineering and penetration tests, Sherri has been passionate about cybersecurity. You can read more about her experiences as a hacker turned security consultant in Jeremy N. Smith’s 2019 book, Breaking and Entering: The Extraordinary Story of a Hacker Called “Alien”. This book explores a wide range of themes, from personal and professional risks to the light and dark sides of what it was like to be a female hacker at MIT in the 1990s. It features Sherri as the protagonist and explores today’s cybersecurity issues through her real-life experiences.

Sherri is a mentor and lecturer at the Institute for Computing in Reserach.

Shih-Lien (Linus) Lu

Shih-Lien (Linus) Lu is currently a Visiting Professor of the School of Innovation and Technology at Warner Pacific University, Portland Oregon. He is on leave from PieceMakers Technology in Taiwan where he serves as the Chief Solutions Officer. He was a Director at TSMC Research and Development from 2016 to 2021. From 1999 to 2016, he was with Intel Corporation, Hillsboro, Oregon, where he was a research scientist, a research group manager, and later the Director of Memory Architecture Lab in Intel Labs. He served on the faculty of the ECE Department at the Oregon State University as an Assistant Professor from 1991 to 1995 and as a tenured Associate Professor until 2001 (on leave the last two years). From 1984 to 1991, he worked on the MOSIS project at USC/ISI which provides US research and education community VLSI fabrication services. He has published more than 130 papers and authored or co-authored more than 180 US patents. His research interests include computer hardware and software security, and computer memory architecture, circuits and technology. An IEEE Fellow, Shih-Lien received his B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from UC Berkeley and M.S. and Ph.D. both in Computer Science and Engineering from UCLA. Linus is a mentor and lecturer at the Institute for Computing in Research.

Taylor Blair

Taylor Blair is a computer scientist and data scientist, with interests in several applications of advanced software development and data analysis techniques from human-computer interaction and other areas. A Computer Science candidate at Reed College, Taylor has also worked for Microsoft in both Azure Core and Developer Division.

In addition to research and software development, Taylor is also a photographer and loves teaching in a way that makes advanced material practical. Taylor Blair is a mentor at the Institute for Computing in Research.

Tyler Millhouse

Tyler Millhouse is a postdoctoral fellow at the Santa Fe Institute, working on the “Foundations of Intelligence in Natural and Artificial Systems” project. His research seeks to understand how concepts from AI and machine learning can inform the philosophy of cognitive science and the philosophy of science more generally. As a research assistant, Tyler has developed deep neural networks to solve problems in planetary science, studied metaethical reasoning in children, and explored the cognitive limits of rule learning.

Tyler received his PhD in Philosophy from the University of Arizona in 2021, his MA in Philosophy from Tufts University in 2014, and his BA in Philosophy from Ashland University. His dissertation offers a revised version of real patterns that draws heavily on work in information theory and machine learning. In his free time, he enjoys cooking, coding, astrophotography, and watching terrible movies.


[…] said Gandalf. “And there are names among us that are worth more than a thousand mail-clad knights apiece. No, he will not smile.”