NRBSC Staff
Joel R. Stiles, M.D., Ph.D., is Director of the National Resource for Biomedical Supercomputing (NRBSC; www.nrbsc.org) at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC; www.psc.edu), and Associate Professor in the Mellon College of Science (www.cmu.edu/mcs) and Lane Center for Computational Biology (lane.compbio.cmu.edu) at Carnegie Mellon University. The NRBSC is a Biotechnology Research Resource center funded by the National Center for Research Resources at the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Stiles also holds adjunct Associate Professorships in the Department of Biology at Carnegie Mellon University and the Departments of Neuroscience and Computational Biology at the University of Pittsburgh. Dr. Stiles is perhaps best described as a computational physiologist, with general research interests in cell and tissue modeling applied to personalized medicine, and current specific interests in synaptic and cellular microphysiology. His work includes creation and distribution of research and teaching software for spatially realistic simulations of cellular function, and has illustrated counter-intuitive structure-function relationships at the nerve-muscle synapse and in specific instances of neuromuscular disease. He is a principal co-author of MCell, a Monte Carlo simulator of cellular microphysiology, and is also the principal architect of DReAMM (Design, Render, and Animate MCell Models; www.mcell.psc.edu). Dr. Stiles also directs educational outreach activities from K-12 through graduate levels at the NRBSC and PSC, including the highly acclaimed CMIST program (Computational Modules In Science Teaching; www.psc.edu/eot/k12/cmist.php).
Christal Banks - Christal's career background includes extensive management and special event planning, along with organizational development in retail, non-profit, and higher academia environments. Christal came to us from the the School of Engineering at CMU, where she was the Graduate Admissions Coordinator for the Biomedical Engineering department and directed the
"Engineering Your Future" (EYF) program. EYF was designed for Pittsburgh Public Schools middle and high school girls to encourage interests and
careers in science, math, and engineering. Currently, she is pursuing a M.A. in Leadership and Business Ethics at Duquesne University.
Jen-Chien Jack Chang, Ph.D., received a BS in computer science and a BS in mathematics from the University of Washington in 1993. He then entered the graduate program of the University of Washington school of music studying music technology and opera production and direction for two years, but the program was eliminated due to state budget cuts. Afterwards, he obtained an MSE in mechanical engineering from the University of Washington specializing in virtual environment and interface design in 1997. In 2000, he received a Ph.D. in industrial engineering from the University of Washington for implicit solid modeling using the interval methods. He did one year of post-doc work in the civil engineering department of the University of Washington designing and implementing a virtual asphalt hot-mix compaction vehicle simulator. He joined PSC in July 2002, and works in the CQBS on MCell/DReAMM development.
Jenda Domaracki brings with her experience in public relations, training and development, web design, and programming to PSC's Center for Quantitative Biological Simulation as a scientific multimedia designer. She is responsible for the development of the CQBS Microphysiology Gateway and MCell/DReAMM online tutorials and documentation. She earned a BA in art & technology in 1999, and her M.Ed. in 2005 from Seton Hill University, focusing on asynchronous learning for adults and corporate training.
Greg Hood received a BS in mathematics and a BA in philosophy from Case Western Reserve University in 1980 and an MS in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University in 1982. He joined the Biomedical Group at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center in 1995, and has been a neuroscience specialist there since 1999.
Pallavi Ishwad, Ph.D. - I am responsible for educational outreach activities focused on Computational Biomedicine and research carried out at the National Resource for biomedical Supercomputing (NRBSC), as well as other research performed at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center. I will be obtaining information from NRBSC and PSC scientists in the fields of computational microphysiology, volumetric data imaging and analysis, structural biology and other areas and developing outreach educational materials for a vast range of audiences.
Boris Kaminsky, Ph.D., earned a Ph.D. in physics from Lviv State University, Ukraine in 1987. He worked in the fields of solid state physics, optics, and also in the television industry. He joined CMU in 1996, where he designed acousto-optical multispectral cameras and microscopes and developed software and simulation and modeling tools for various scientific applications using C/C++ and Java. Kaminsky has published over 40 papers in journals and conference proceedings and obtained 3 patents. He received an M.S. in information technology from CMU in 2003, and joined the PSC staff in 2004. Currently, he works in CQBS with Dr. Joel Stiles.
Hugh B. Nicholas Jr., Ph.D., is a computational biological chemist whose research interest is in methods for identifying essential, informative residues in protein and nucleic acid sequences. This work has included the identification of essential t-RNA bases for recognition by the charging enzymes and amino acyl synthetases using multiple sequence analysis techniques that he has developed. He received a BS in 1963 and Ph.D. in chemistry in 1969 from the University of Oklahoma. He was a postdoctoral research fellow in Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1968 to 1971 and a biophysics researcher at the University of Wisconsin from 1971 to 1987. He joined the staff at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center in 1987 and was promoted to Senior Scientific Specialist in 1992.
Alexander J. Ropelewski is a senior programmer who designs and writes sequence analysis programs. He has not only implemented a variety of sequence analysis algorithms on high performance computers, but has also been involved in the development and design of a sequence-structure alignment program. He received a BS in computer science from the University of Pittsburgh in 1989. He has been an applications programmer in the Biomedical Group at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center since 1989 and has implemented sequence analysis codes on a wide range of high performance computers, including: Cray Research X-MP, Y-MP, C90, J90, T3D and T3E; Thinking Machine Corporation CM-2 and CM-5; and a Convex C-3. He was promoted to Coordinator for Biomedical Software Development in 1995.
Arthur W. Wetzel is a Principal Computer Scientist leading projects in biomedical imaging, statistical classification and large networked data repositories. He received his BA in chemistry from Thiel College in 1973 and did his Ph.D. work in the Interdisciplinary Department of Information Science of the University of Pittsburgh, where he served as an Adjunct Assistant Professor from 1980 to 1981 and again from 1988 to the present. From 1981 to 1983, he was Member of the Technical Staff of Bell Telephone Laboratories in Holmdel, New Jersey designing "silicon compiler" and simulation tools for integrated circuits. In 1983, he joined Pixel Computer, Inc. becoming Vice President of R&D in 1985 leading development of graphical workstations. Art came to CMU in 1988 to work on operating systems and document imaging projects in the Computing Services department. He joined PSC in 1995. His biomedical projects include semi-automated pathology diagnosis, pulsed illumination microscopic imaging, and mass spectrometry analysis collaborations with University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. He is the architect of PSC's Volume Browser for networked analysis and visualization of large volumetric datasets.
Troy Wymore, Ph.D. is a computational chemist with research interests in enzyme mechanisms and protein structure prediction. He received a BS in chemistry from the University of Missouri in 1993 and his Ph.D. in 1999, studying peptide-lipid interactions through molecular dynamics simulations and 2D NMR. He joined the staff at the PSC in 1999 and is also a member of the Training Faculty for the Joint CMU-Pitt Ph.D. program in Computational Biology.
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