Organisational health

Building a multi-institutional, multi-disciplinary team like NeSI takes time. The NeSI team continued to grow in 2018 to support our expanding user base and new infrastructure, as well as bring in new capabilities across multiple teams and service areas.

• Blair Bethwaite joined NeSI’s senior leadership team as Solutions Manager, bringing significant experience and international connections across HPC and research cloud engineering, platforms, and solutions.
• NeSI’s support team expanded to welcome two new members, Dinindu Senanayake and Callum Walley, to expand our domain expertise in genomics and engineering
• Our collaboration and integration team welcomed Nitharsan Puwanendran, a new analyst programmer to help improve our business systems and websites.
• Nooriyah Lohani joined the engagement team as a new Research Communities Advisor to work more closely with and understand our user requirements.
• To support NeSI’s growing product management practice, Brian Flaherty was hired as a data services product manager near the end of the year to help us roll out new and improved data services in 2019. Michael Uddstrom, NeSI’s Platforms Manager, will be retiring in 2019. Since NeSI’s start, Michael has been working nationally with scientific communities to identify and respond to their HPC and data science needs, and extracting patterns, issues, and requirements that have helped drive positive change to NeSI and NIWA’s shared infrastructure and services platform. Planning for Michael’s departure began in Q4, with two new related positions being recruited.

Attribution: 

In October 2018, the full NeSI team gathered near Christchurch for its annual retreat.