OSDC PIRE Researchers (2016)
Fellows
Meet this year’s research fellows, continuing extended projects with their established international collaborators.
Robert (Race) Clark III
- PhD student at the University of Oklahoma
- Field: Meteorology
- Host: Project Matsu in Namibia
Race is currently a PhD student at the University of Oklahoma, where he is studying meteorology. He works as a Graduate Research Assistant for the Cooperative Institute of Mesoscale Meteorological Studies and the National Severe Storms Laboratory. His PhD project is to determine the relative importance of various meteorological and hydrometeorological factors in the development of flash flooding events; this work will eventually lead to the development of novel medium-range flash flood forecasting techniques.
Race’s PIRE project contributes to the OSDC Project Matsu, which develops open source technology for cloud-based processing of satellity imagery to support the earth sciences and disaster relief efforts. His MS is in Meteorology from the University of Oklahoma, and his BS is in Chemical Engineering from Oklahoma State University. He enjoys running, exploring abandoned places, and the Oklahoma City Thunder.
Zac Flamig
- PhD student at the University of Oklahoma
- Field: Meteorology
- Host: Project Matsu in Namibia
Zac Flamig is a Ph.D candidate in the School of Meteorology at the University of Oklahoma. His research interests include hydrologic modeling at small scales over large domains, crowd sourced data collection, disaster response and radar meteorology. Zac holds a BS and MS in meteorology from the University of Oklahoma. When Zac isn’t working on hydrologic models he enjoys developing apps for iOS, chasing storms in Oklahoma and following the latest space launch news.
Christine Harvey
- PhD student at George Mason University
- Field: Computational Science and Informatics
- Host Institution: University of Amsterdam, Netherlands
Christine is currently in a graduate program at George Mason University, working on her PhD in Computational Science and Informatics. The focus of her research is analyzing and modeling the organ transplant system in the United States.
Christine is working with Dr. Paul Martin and others at the University of Amsterdam on ways for agents to intelligently interpret the data standards in the
transplant system in order to reason and model across heterogeneous datasets.
The data standards for the United States organ transplant system are publicly
available. These standards have changed over time and chronological connec-
tions could be made in addition to potentially linking the data across inter-
national datasets. This research involves building models to translate
between different data standards.
Joshua Eisenberg
- PhD student at Florida International University
- Field: Computational Mathematics, Computer Engineering
- Host Institution: University of Amsterdam, Netherlands
Joshua is working towards a PhD in Computer Engineering from Florida International University, where he also received his B.S. in Computer Engineering. He researches natural language processing, focusing on computational models of narrative and improvisation. Joshua also has a B.A. in Mathematics from Brandeis University.
Josh is working with Dr. Paul Martin at the University of Amsterdam (UvA). The project will employ Joshua’s experience in natural language processing (NLP) to build a system that annotates relations from an ontology onto a text document. A system like the one being proposed here can be used to identify gaps and shortcomings in the ontologies created to describe such complex systems. Automatic annotation of encoded concepts will allow designers of systems to objectively see how the ontology relations map onto free text. The goal of this work is to make the ontology design process more efficient.
Nam Pho
- Graduate student at the Georgia Institute of Technology
- Field: Computer Science
- Host Institution: Laboratory of Computer Networks and Architecture, University of Sao Paulo, Brazil
Nam is currently a MS student at Georgia Tech where he studies computer networking. He also works in the research computing group at Harvard Medical School (HMS) where he maintains the high-performance computing cluster for biomedical research and is a member of the school’s ice hockey team. His research at HMS in the lab of Chirag Patel studies the influence of environmental exposure on disease in large population-scale datasets.
Nam’s PIRE project at the University of Sao Paulo Paulo will provide an automated big data processing workflow employing bioinformatics best practices on top of infrastructure as code DevOps tooling. He will also analyze the use of homomorphic encryption techniques in database applications to assess strengths, weaknesses, and performance in scalability in the cloud.
He has an MS from Johns Hopkins University and a BS from the University of Maryland.