RESEARCH SOFTWARE COLLABORATIONS - Key Persons
Benedikt Hegner is experimental physicist and computer scientist working as staff scientist at CERN's EP-SFT group. He is a software enthusiast and expert for highly parallel data processing applications and facilities.
He received his Ph.D. in Experimental Particle Physics from Hamburg University, working for the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). As CERN scientist, he worked on developing and designing data processing applications for a range of HEP experiments at CERN, KEK, and for the studies for the Future Circular Collider. In 2018/2019 Benedikt Hegner spent a scientific sabbatical at Brookhaven National Laboratory and was Deputy Director of their Scientific Data and Computing Center. Since 2019 he is adjunct faculty a the Insitute of Advanced Computational Science of the Stony Brook University.
Nowadays, he works on the experiment-independent Key4hep software stack and is a leading member of the HEP Software Foundation, promoting common solutions to the software and computing challenges for the HL-LHC and beyond.
Biography
Brij Kishor Jashal is a scientist working in the domain of experimental particle physics, scientific computing and research software. His current research focuses on the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) and Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN). At Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Department of Atomic Energy, his responsibilities include building, managing and operating large scale scientific computing infrastructure, software and services for High energy Physics. In addition, he is a research scholar of Experimental Particle Physics at Instituto de Física Corpuscular, University of Valencia working at LHCb experiment. In past he has been a Research Scientist at India Space Research Organization (ISRO), where he made key contributions in the development of India Water Resource Information System, a project of national importance.
David Lange is a research scientist in the Department of Physics at Princeton University. He earned a Ph.D. in Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and previously was a staff scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. He has been a member of the CMS experiment at CERN since 2006, where his research has focused on application software, and distributed computing, infrastructures needed to carry out the data-intensive scientific program of CMS. His current focus is is on the R&D needed for upgrades of these systems required for the Exabyte-scale datasets expected from the high luminosity running phase of the LHC (HL-LHC). Lange is also an executive board member of the Institute for Research and Innovation in Software for High Energy Physics (IRIS-HEP) project funded by the US NSF, which develops state-of-the-art software for the HL-LHC. He was previously the co-coordinator of the offline software and computing for the CMS experiment, and is currently responsible for modeling the computing resource needs of CMS in the near-term and longer-term future.
Dr. Vasil Vassilev is a researcher in the field of software engineering with Princeton University. His main research interests are in the field of programming languages and systems for processing large amounts of data.
Vassil is a co-author of the interactive C++ interpreter, Cling, which facilitates the processing of scientific data in the field of high energy physics (HEP) and beyond. The interpreter is an essential part of the software tools of the LHC experimental program and was part of the software used to detect the gravitational waves of the LIGO experiment. As of today, Cling has helped to analyze 1 Exabyte physics data, which is the basis for the publication of over 1000 scientific publications in various scientific journals and conferences such as Nature, Physics Letters and Physical Review Letters. For the last 10 years he has been involved in the modernization of the specialized software package for processing exabytes of scientific data called ROOT. The software package is the basis of data analysis in experimental physics, playing a significant role in the discovery of the Higgs boson from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and the large cavity in the Pyramid of Cheops. Led the integration (and occasional enhancements) of the C++ Modules feature in HEP.
He is responsible for the participation of Bulgaria in the ISO C++ standards committee and JTC1/SC22 since 2015. Code owner of Incremental compilation, REPLs and clang-repl in the Clang compiler. Works actively in the field of Data Science and a passionate promoter of interactive, differentiable C++ for Data Science. Authored the C/C++ automatic differentiation library, Clad, which enables efficient syntheses of derivatives and gradients.
Gordon Watts is a professor in the Elementary Partciles Experiment group in the physics department at the University of Washington's Seattle campus. He is a member of the ATLAS collaboration at the LHC at CERN and also the MATHUSLA collaboration. His primary physics interested there are searches for long-lived particles decaying in the calorimeter (this recent paper, for example), where heavy use of Machine Learning techniques are employed. He is also deputy executive director of the IRIS-HEP software institute, a software institute bring together over 20 institutions accross the USA to help build software and facilities to extract as much physics as possible from the HL-LHC experiments. His R&D work in IRIS_HEP concentrtes on the Analysis Systems focus area. Prior to ATLAS, he was a member of the DZERO collaboration at the Tevatron accelerator at Fermilab in Illinois, the CDF experiment at the Tevatron, and before that the AMY experiment on the Tristan accelerator at KEK in Japan. He has lead the flavor tagging groups in ATLAS and DZERO and worked on the top quark discovery, the single-top discovery, and higgs searches.
Job Titles:
- Senior Staff Scientist at CERN
Graeme is a senior staff scientist at CERN in the EP-SFT group has been a member of the ATLAS experiment for many years, holding leading roles in the software project, including Software Coordinator. He is a leading advocate for the importance of software in HEP, contributing to ECFA meetings and the European Strategy Update. He has supervised students in diverse fields, from data management to machine learning for detector simulation. Graeme has been an IAC member and Programme Committee Chair of the CHEP conference. He is a leading member of the HEP Software Foundation, promoting common solutions to the software and computing challenges for the HL-LHC and beyond.
Job Titles:
- Research Software Engineer in High Energy Physics at Princeton University
Biography
Henry Schreiner is a Computational Physicist / Research Software Engineer in High Energy Physics at Princeton University. He specializes in the interface between high-performance compiled codes and interactive computation in Python, in software distribution, and in interface design. He has previously worked on computational cosmic-ray tomography for archaeology and high performance GPU model fitting. He is currently a member of the IRIS-HEP project, developing tools for the next era of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
He is a maintainer/core developer for pypa/build, scikit-build, cibuildwheel, pybind11, meson-python, and plubmum for Python. He is an admin of Scikit-HEP, and a lead designer on boost-histogram, hist, UHI, vector, Particle, and DecayLanguage packages there. He is also the lead author of the Scikit-HEP developer pages and scikit-hep/cookie. He is the primary author of CLI11, a C++ library used by Microsoft terminal and many others. He is also the lead web developer for IRIS-HEP. He is also the author of Modern CMake and a variety of CMake, GPU, and Python training courses and classes. He is also a convener for the HSF Software Developer Tools and Packaging group.
Peter Elmer is an experimental particle physicist whose area of expertise is developing the software and computing systems needed to operate and produce scientific results from data-intensive high energy physics experiments. His current research focuses on the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN). In the past he has worked on the ALEPH experiment at CERN and the BaBar experiment at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC). He is the Executive Director and Principal Investigator for the NSF-funded Institute for Research and Innovation in Software for High Energy Physics (IRIS-HEP).
He received a Ph.D. in Experimental High Energy Physics from the University of Wisconsin - Madison and is a Senior Research Physicist at Princeton University.
Job Titles:
- Professor of Physics at UPRM
Sudhir Malik is a Professor of Physics at UPRM. Malik is appointed as a member of the High Energy Physics Advisory Panel (2022-2025) to DOE and NSF. Malik is also elected as the U.S. CMS Collaboration Board Deputy Chair (2022-2024) and chairs the U.S. CMS Diversity, Inclusion and Equity Committee. In 2020 Malik served on SESAPS Pegram Award Committee. Malik co-led two Snowmass21 Community Engagement Frontier Working Groups, namely, Physics Education and Career Pipeline & Development.
Malik has played several leadership roles in the CMS experiment. Malik played key role in construction of the very first CMS Pixel detector(2005-2008) and established several training programs (2008 onwards) in CMS including Data Analysis, Physics Objects and Upgrade Schools training over 4000 thousand physicists. Malik played a major role (2008-2014) in establishing the Fermilab LPC center as the hub of educational workshops. Malik served as Level-2 co-Manager for CMS Physics Support in Offline and Computing (2016- 2022) group. Malik serves as co-chair of the CMS Schools Committee (2014-present). In 2013, Malik co-setup the CMS Career Committee that actively organizes industry job career sessions with CMS alumni for early careers. It has evolved into CERN wide events supported by a networking portal. Malik is the training coordinator for IRIS-HEP (2018-2023) and co-convenor HSF (2018-2022) training group. Malik is actively engaged in HEP outreach Quarknet program. Malik has established career paths for several physics, computer science and engineering Undergrad and Master students at UPRM and actively engages with K-12 students and teachers in Puerto Rico in STEM activities. Malik serves as a member of the Strategic Planning Committee of UPRM.