ICDS News

Staff Spotlight: Lindsay Wells

Lindsay Wells, systems engineer, started her career at the Penn State Institute for Computational and Data Sciences (ICDS) in May of 2019 when ICDS was named the Penn State Institute for CyberScience. Over the course of her time at ICDS, she has focused on user support, problem solving, mentorship, designing systems and solutions and collaboration. 

“In my current role, I am looking for solutions that are not just high-performance computing related but taking in the computational needs of the broader research community and that includes automation and standardizing, designing workflows and systems implementation,” Wells said. 

Wells, alongside the technical team, collaborates with the other Penn State research institutes and stakeholders to design and implement systems and workflows to accelerate research, working directly with scientists to understand their computational needs. The team creates the best hardware and software infrastructure to effectively run complex research simulations and data analysis. 

“This is an opportunity to collaborate with other institutes at Penn State and find ways to leverage existing resources or to design future systems based on scientist and researcher needs,” she added. “My focus is on analyzing research requirements, including data types, computational demands and desired outcomes, to identify the most suitable computing solutions designed around human interaction to enhance the user experience while enabling research.” 

In a project with the Materials Research Institute (MRI), Wells is working on standardizing data management workflows to limit the burdens that researchers face.  

“This project is working on automating the data transfer off of the instrumentation and onto Roar Collab storage standardizing the data for researchers and how their data gets from point A to point B, ensuring that they are complying with their respective agencies’ requirements,” she said. 

Prior to working in the technical team, Wells was first a team lead with iASK, which is now the Client Support Helpdesk, where she provided support for the Roar research community and mentored graduate students.  

“At the time, I provided user support and training and worked on software development and installations as well as mentoring graduate students,” she said. “I really enjoyed being able to provide graduate and undergraduate students with the opportunity to work at ICDS and complement their domains of study with high-level technical training and skills. It was rewarding.” 

She also experienced being a mentee herself. 

“Taking the step into research computing was a learning curve for me coming from a more enterprise IT systems administration role in the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences,” she said. “I really enjoy the people I work with, the collaborative nature of the work, problem solving and community. We are here for a reason and enabling interdisciplinary research is a common goal for us at ICDS.” 

Outside of ICDS, Wells travels across the country with her husband and daughter, who is on a national traveling softball team.  

“Softball and our love for travel and adventure, has taken us across the country and beyond,” she said. 

She also is a lover of animals who has two dogs and when allotted time, fosters dogs. 

See more staff spotlights and learn more about how ICDS can support your computational research here. 

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