ICDS News

Credit: Halley Maxin

Staff Spotlight: Halley Maxin

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Penn State Institute for Computational and Data Sciences (ICDS) projects, both internal and external to the institute, run and are completed efficiently because of the diligence of the expert project managers across various domains that work closely with ICDS co-hires on their research. 

Halley Maxin, research engineering project manager, started at ICDS in August 2022 originally as a high-performance computing engineering project manager, where she worked on internal projects such as updating the Roar alerts system and user transitions as well as decommissioning old equipment. 

“These projects involved various other ICDS team members and were directly related to our initiatives and keeping the Roar cluster running,” Maxin said. 

External to ICDS, Maxin has worked on various projects funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation such as the Campus Cyberinfrastructure project and the Research Data Storage initiative.  

“It was a lot of fun working with the IT professionals and researchers at some of the partner schools to help connect them with the resources that larger schools like Penn State have,” Maxin said. 

Overall, as project manager, Maxin works to help researchers meet their goals and deadlines. 

In July, Maxin started working closely with ICDS co-hire Keith Cheng and supporting his work through the Penn State College of Medicine and ICDS. Much of Cheng’s work is funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Energy. 

“I help manage Keith’s research projects, keeping the team on track to meet goals and deadlines,” Maxin said. 

Cheng’s current work focuses on developing innovative methods for 3D tissue imaging to take sets of pictures of an animal, zebrafish for example, at thousands of angles in 2D. Then, the images would be converted into 3D images which will make models of the animal on a larger scale. The research has potential to be translated to humans. (will link to the Penn State News story on this) 

“In this role, I have been given an inside look into what the researchers are actually doing,” Maxin said. “Keith is the only ICDS co-hire out of the College of Medicine. It has been really cool to meet with the research team at Hershey and see what they are doing in their fish and micro-CT lab.” 

Through her time at ICDS, Maxin has continued her education at Penn State. She earned a master’s degree in project management in August 2024 and is currently working on her master’s of business administration. 

Her current goals are to obtain a Project Mangement Professional certification and be more involved in the various aspects of research projects that she hasn’t yet had the opportunity to do, such as budgeting, and apply the knowledge she is learning in the master’s of business administration program directly to the work she is doing. 

“Getting the chance to work with faculty like Keith is a privilege,” Maxin said. “I feel lucky to be involved in his work and be part of his team, as well as working in the ICDS environment and seeing the inside workings of Roar. I want to continue to provide excellent project management support in service of ICDs and our faculty co-hires’ research initiatives.” 

Outside of work, Maxin has a love for travel like no other. She has been to almost 40 countries and is about to travel to Istanbul. 

Learn more about research-enabled by ICDS on the website. 

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