Learn how the High Performance Computing (HPC) team engages with faculty and students who leverage the computational power of the DEAC Cluster to enhance their research and teaching, and promote collaboration, creativity, technological advancement, and academic excellence!
Featured Participants
The HPC Team would like to give their thanks to Dr. Lauren Lowman, Paul Kefer, Ilse Schaeffner, Dr. Ron Thompson, and Dr. Sam Cho for their participation.
Lauren Lowman
Lauren Lowman is an Assistant Professor in the Engineering Department at Wake Forest University and has served in this role since 2018. She received a Ph.D. and M.S. in Civil and Environmental Engineering with a focus in Hydrology and Fluid Dynamics from Duke University, and a B.A. in Public Policy Studies from Duke University. Her research investigates how extreme events and affect overall ecosystem health, productivity, and sustainability using numerical models, geospatial data analysis, and field experiments. She is also passionate about developing and sharing inclusive teaching practices in STEM fields and received a 2020 Engineering Unleashed Fellowship from the Kern Family Foundation to support this work.
Paul Kefer
Paul Kefer is a senior computer science and mathematical statistics major and neuroscience minor working on computer vision applications for fluorescence microscopy. He has participated in the Intro to HPC Class and/or SC student cluster competition for four years at Wake Forest.
Ilse Schaeffner
Ilse Schaeffner is a senior biochemistry and molecular biology major at Wake Forest University. With an interest in the relationship between protein structure and function, she joined Dr. Thomas Hollis’s structural biology lab at the Wake Forest School of Medicine. The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic inspired her to begin a molecular dynamics project to measure the energetic and structural implications of mutations in the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein at highly conserved amino acid residues.
Ron Thompson
Ron Thompson is the John. B. McKinnon Professor of Management and Area Chair in the School of Business at Wake Forest University. Ron has published articles in top Information Systems research journals, and is a former Senior Editor for MIS Quarterly. His teaching interests are focused on Data Management and Information Technology Management.
Samuel Cho
Dr. Samuel Cho is an Associate Professor with a joint appointment in the Departments of Physics and Computer Science. His computational biophysics research group performs and optimizes parallel algorithms on GPUs for molecular dynamics simulations of biomolecular folding and dynamics. He is also the Graduate Director for the MS Program in the Computer Science Department and Co-Director of the Data Science Certificate Program. He received his Ph.D. from University of California, San Diego and B.S. from University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He is a member of the Biophysical Society Committee for Inclusion and Diversity.
Meet the HPC Team
Special thanks go to Will Tomlinson for providing our new 3D logo and renders. WFU campus and classroom footage provided by Travis Van Sweden. Portions of the following videos were used in our production:
Wow, HPC is so cool!