NERSC Analytics Team Staff

Edward W. (Wes) Bethel is the leader of both the NERSC Analytics Team and the LBNL Visualization Group. Bethel joined the group in 1990, and has been active developing and applying visualization technology to a wide range of scientific disciplines. Bethel has served as Principal Investigator on numerous visualization-centric projects, ranging from Laboratory Directed Research and Development through efforts funded directly through the U.S. Department of Energy. Bethel's research interests include combining Virtual Reality technology with scientific visualization and computing and scalable rendering architectures. Bethel earned an M.S. in Computer Science in 1986 from the University of Tulsa under Dr. Samuel P. Uselton. Bethel is a member of ACM, ACM/Siggraph and IEEE.

Hank Childs is a computer systems engineer at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and also a professional researcher at UC Davis. He is most well known as the architect of VisIt, a popular visualization and analysis tool for very large data. Hank is a member of the NERSC Analytics team, as well as the Chief Software Architect of VACET, the SciDAC center devoted to visualization and analysis. Hank received both his B.S. and Ph.D. from UC Davis. His website can be found here.

Mark Howison holds a B.S. in mathematics from Brown University (2006) and an M.S. in computer science from UC Berkeley (2009). In his previous research, he has fabricated mathematical artwork, designed visualization tools, and investigated how people use technology to learn about mathematics and science. His recent projects at LBNL include profiling and improving collective I/O performance on NERSC's flagship Cray XT4 system, tuning image processing filters for multicore processors and GPUs, and researching parallelization strategies for visualization algorithms.

Janet Jacobsen has returned to the Berkeley Lab after working in the Atmospheric Sciences Division at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and, more recently, at the Engineering Systems Research Center (ESRC) and the Institute for Quantitative Biomedical Research (QB3) at UC Berkeley. Previously at Berkeley Lab, Janet was a staff scientist in the Earth Sciences Division, where she analyzed field data, developed finite element mesh generators for fracture data and numerical simulators for reactive chemical transport, and developed visualizations involving many types of field data. Janet received both an M.A. in mathematics and a B.A. in applied mathematics and statistics from UC Berkeley. Janet's primary role on the NERSC Analytics Team will be to work with users to create data visualizations, but she also will be involved in helping users to simplify the process of getting their simulation output or experimental data into data visualization software at NERSC and in working with other Analytics Team members to develop workflow and analysis tools.

Peter Nugent joined NERSC after four years as a post-doc in the Lab's Physics Division to help strengthen the computational astrophysics activity at NERSC. Peter worked with Saul Perlmutter's Supernova Cosmology Project and used NERSC's Cray T3E and IBM SP supercomputers to perform thousands of supernova simulations. As the theorist in Saul's group, Peter conducted "spectrum synthesis," starting with a theory of an exploding supernova to create a theoretical spectrum and then compare that model with observed data. The goal of the work is to make supernovae a better tool for cosmology. Peter earned his Ph.D. in physics, with a concentration in astronomy, from the University of Oklahoma.

Prabhat's research interests include computer graphics, scientific visualization, high-performance rendering, human-computer interaction, general-purpose computation on graphics processors, and machine learning. He previously worked as a graphics system analyst at the Center for Computation and Visualization (CCV) at Brown University, where he supported a variety of interdisciplinary scientific projects ranging from virtual archaeology, high-dimensional mathematics, developmental biology, and computational neurosciences to planetary geosciences. For example, he worked with geoscientists on developing a virtual terrain exploration tool for missions to Mars. Prabhat earned a bachelor's degree in computer science from the Indian Institute of Technology in New Delhi in 1999 and a master's degree in computer science from Brown in 2001.

Dani Ushizima joined Berkeley Lab after three years at the Catholic University of Santos, Brazil as professor, researcher and head of the Computer Vision Lab, under the Brazilian Young Researcher Award. She has collaborated with high technology groups in universities and companies in Brazil since 1996, focusing on the application of pattern recognition to several media, particularly digital images in medicine, agriculture and climate. She received her PhD in Computational Physics at Physics Institute, University of Sao Paulo (USP) in 2004, where she developed a prototype for computer-aided leukemia diagnosis using multivariable statistics, and feature selection tools for multi-purpose data applications.  In 2004, she was also a Visiting Researcher in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at UC Santa Barbara. She received her B.S. in Computer Science from the Federal University of Sao Carlos, Brazil, while working on automation of Intensive Therapy Unit procedures in collaboration with industry (Dixtal Biomedica). Her research interests include machine vision, image analysis, pattern recognition, quantitative microscopy and statistical analysis.

Gunther Weber comes to Berkeley Lab from UC Davis, where he was an assistant project scientist at the Institute for Data Analysis and Visualization. At IDAV, Gunther's research focused around visualization and computer graphics. Gunther worked on visualization of three-dimensional gene expression data (with researchers in the Lab's Genomics and Life Sciences divisions), topology-based exploration of scalar data, and visualization of brain imaging data and experimental earthquake data. Gunther has worked at NERSC before, as a student employee and then a guest student assistant in NERSC's Visualization Group between 2000 and 2003. He has also been a guest in the Lab's Life Sciences Division since 2003. He received his bachelor's, master's and doctorate degrees in computer science from the University of Kaiserslautern in Germany. His research interests include scientific visualization, computer graphics, data analysis, bioinformatics, topological data analysis methods, hierarchical data representation methods, gene expression data analysis, and visualization and image synthesis.