Five BIO5 staff mark over a decade of technological impact at CyVerse
Members of CyVerse, the world's largest publicly funded open-source cyberinfrastructure for life sciences, celebrate their 10 and 15 year anniversaries at the BIO5 Institute.
Our researchers are what make the BIO5 Institute so special as an organization dedicated to interdisciplinary sciences and focused on community impact in Arizona. Behind the scenes, many of these researchers work on cyberinfrastructure and datasets that support large-scale, collaborative biosciences projects.
This year, we’re celebrating five staff who have dedicated over a decade of their career to CyVerse, the world's largest publicly funded open-source cyberinfrastructure for life sciences housed within the University of Arizona BIO5 Institute. We want to thank and congratulate Andy Edmonds, Sarah Roberts, and John Wregglesworth for their fifteen years of service and Ian McEwen and Mariah Wall for their ten years of service.
Meet two of the staff who have been key to helping CyVerse grow since its inception in 2008 serving plant science communities to today, where it has been tapped to catalyze biosciences discoveries between institutions.
Amidst enormous amounts of data, there’s always space for education.
When it comes to modern science, very little would get done without support from technologists—proper software, computing capabilities, data storage, and processing speeds are all critical to the research workflow. For reliable, secure, open-source cyberinfrastructure, researchers can turn to CyVerse.
“They’re fun people and it’s challenging work,” says Andy Edmonds, infrastructure manager at CyVerse for fifteen years, “There’s always something to do.”
In his role, Edmonds is responsible for the upkeep of over 400 servers—both physical and virtual—which house an eight-petabyte storage system called the Data Store.
Andy Edmonds, CyVerse infrastructure manager
CyVerse supports learning and engagement from elementary to graduate school and has supported over fourteen PhD projects on their servers as well as providing web-based learning platforms for school-aged children learning about DNA and genomics.
Keeping up with the times: Innovation at CyVerse
With beginnings in the plant sciences, CyVerse now services researchers across all kinds of disciplines. Astronomy, says Sarah Roberts, has been one of her favorite sciences to work with since she began her work at CyVerse fifteen years ago.
Roberts is the team lead for CyVerse’s Discovery Environment, a web application that is used to launch processes that analyze data. Along with her team, Roberts helps CyVerse users run data analysis through the web application and select the appropriate tools.
Sarah Roberts, CyVerse Discovery Environment team lead
One of the more interesting projects she’s worked on was creating a chatbot using advanced AI systems to generate text or responses in a smart way while ensuring that the user’s private data remained safe and protected throughout the process.
CyVerse’s efforts have allowed researchers to host, store, and process significantly larger amounts of data than ever before at a faster, more accessible rate.
Helping a diverse set of users and the rapid development of technology, both Roberts and Edmonds say, has been exciting to monitor, study, and incorporate throughout their time at CyVerse.