Q&A with Pat Clemins

 

 
Patrick Clemins, PhD, recently received an appointment to a steering committee with the Campus Research Computing Consortium (CaRCC) People Network Emerging Centers Track. He took a few moments to share his professional experiences and discuss what that appointment means.
 
What is your role with Vermont EPSCoR?
 
I'm Vermont EPSCoR's Manager, Cyberinfrastructure and Partnerships. I make sure that our researchers have the computing resources they need to perform their research and help them use those resources through training and software support. Separately, I also work with our partner organizations and build new partnerships to implement our private sector and workforce development initiatives. And finally, I participate in EPSCoR's research effort as appropriate, analyzing data, running models, and preparing publications.
 
What is the CaRCC People Network Emerging Centers Track? Can you describe this as if I knew nothing about it?
 
The Campus Research Computing Consortium (CaRCC) is an organization of research computing professionals, mostly in the U.S. The CaRCC People Network is their community-building effort which largely consists of monthly virtual meetings and gatherings at national conferences. Their People Network is organized into different tracks aligned along the various roles of research computing professionals including systems administration (Systems-facing), data management (Data-facing), and working directly with researchers (Researcher-facing). Then, there's also an Emerging Centers Track which focuses on the issues faced by research computing groups that are just starting out or at smaller institutions. Some of the topics covered by the Emerging Centers Track are funding models for research computing centers, grant writing to acquire support for center activities, how to organize your center, and best practices for growing your center.
 
What will you be doing on the Steering Committee?
 
The Steering Committee helps the two Track Coordinators plan the monthly virtual meetings, including helping to choose the topics to be discussed and finding speakers. We also discuss potential future community efforts and activities and work to find resources to implement those activities.
 
What skills do you take from your position Vermont EPSCoR into the Steering Committee?
 
My managerial and leadership roles within Vermont EPSCoR have given me the tools to help organize and guide a community like CaRCC. The most important “skill” is taking the time to listen to the community. Then, I guess the actual skill is coalescing those discussions and observations into discrete actions to move the community forward. In this case, it's going to be watching to see which kind of topics and call formats for the monthly video calls result in the best attendance and soliciting feedback from the community to decide what topics to cover going forward and the format of the calls that work best for each individual topic.
 
What are you most looking forward to with this opportunity?
 
The ability to engage with other research computing professionals, share my experiences with them, and in turn, learn from them. UVM is great, but our research computing community is small and there really aren't more than a few folks that do what I do. So, this gives me a chance to see how other people are solving problems similar to the ones I deal with each day and learn about best practices for everything from how to engage with a researcher to technical issues like how to use a piece of software or maintain a compute server.
 
How does your work with CaRCC impact the people of Vermont?
 
CaRCC allows me to engage with my peers outside of Vermont and bring back knowledge and expertise to help us, in Vermont, accomplish our goals.
 
What takeaway do you want to leave our readers with?
 
Vermont is a wonderful place, and our small population and thus, institutions, leads to a lot of great things like the ability to be nimble and a strong sense of community and shared mission. But that small size can also lead to fewer resources and less shared expertise, so its important to me to be involved in these communities that are bigger than Vermont where I can share and promote our strong community values and then bring back tricks of the trade to help me do my job more effectively, making research computing accessible to as many people as possible.