People

Dan Parker has been an advocate of Free and Open Source software solutions for over 25 years. He has worked in higher education since 2001, starting at Hampshire College. In 2009, he made the leap to UMass Amherst and discovered the wonderful world of High-Performance Computing. When he is not digging into the arcane details of a storage system, he enjoys reading, writing, drawing and the hi-res graphics of the great outdoors.

Kevin Bryan is the Manager of HPC Systems at the University of Rhode Island, as well as supporting the Unity platform and its users after URI’s contribution of 55 machines between 2021-2022. He has been doing general systems administration since 2004, and started with HPC in 2015. He has a programming background in languages including C/C++, Python, Java, R, and MATLAB, and he enjoys digging deep to discover the root cause of bugs and performance issues. His free time is spent watching birds and playing chess.

Simon Leary is a UMass Amherst alumnus, receiving a B.S. in Computer Engineering as a member of the Class of 2024. He started at Unity as a student worker in 2021, making him the longest-serving Unity administrator. He has been involved with research facilitation, systems administration, monitoring, and devops, but now mainly focuses on web services. In his free time, he likes to go rock climbing (indoor bouldering), fix broken things, and play video games.

Sol Jerome is an HPC Systems Engineer at UMass Amherst. He graduated from The University of Texas at Austin with a B.S. in Computer Engineering. He has supported Research Computing in some way for the majority of his career. He is interested in creating well-defined, reproducible systems to support the advancement of research. His free time is spent trying to keep up with his kids’ hectic schedules.

Wm. Josiah Erikson, who goes by Josiah, came to UMass Amherst in the Fall 2022 semester after 25 years at Hampshire College, where he served in a variety of roles: student, Sysadmin, Network Engineer, Staff Trustee, HPC Engineer, academic support for the School of Natural Science and then Cognitive Science, Assistant Director of IT for Infrastructure and Telecommunications Systems, Associate Director of IT for Infrastructure and Web Services, and Hampshire College rep to the Five College CIO Meetings. He loves to solve problems creatively, appropriately, and in context, build and lead invested, inspired teams, and build solutions that are reliable and right-sized. He finally graduated from Hampshire College in 2020, and during the course of his 23-year-long undergraduate career, worked on several animated short films and mobile games. His Division III was an oral history of the events of 2019 at Hampshire College as seen through the eyes of its employees. He also loves to ride bicycles, go on road trips, play music, and hike.

Berent Aldikacti completed his MD at Yeditepe University, a postdoctoral fellowship at Massachusetts General Hospital, and a PhD in Molecular and Cell Biology from UMass Amherst. He enjoys building scalable bioinformatics workflows and interactive tools to support translational research. His research contributions span clinical medicine, molecular biology, and computational analysis including development of bioinformatics pipelines for high-throughput omics data. In his free time, Berent likes to play board and video games with his friends and family.

Cecile Cres is a PhD student at the University of Rhode Island. She has been an HPC facilitator for Unity since the Fall 2021 semester and started using HPC in 2018. She has a background in biology and computer science and develops bioinformatics tools using deep learning. Her free time is spent playing card games and practicing oenology.

Connor Kenyon is a full-time Research Computing Facilitator at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. He was previously a student facilitator for both Unity and UMass Dartmouth. His research interests are Numerical Relativity, Ocean Modeling, Computational Performance Evaluation, and Low-Cost HPC. He is currently finishing his PhD in Engineering and Applied Science at UMass Dartmouth, working on projects in black hole physics and ocean modeling.

Cristian Alexander is a Facilitation Intern at UMass Amherst. He graduated from UMass Amherst in 2026 with a B.S. in Physics. He has contributed to research at institutions such as Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, Argonne National Lab, and Princeton University. His research interests include developing workflows for training machine-learned interatomic potentials and exploring their applications to the discovery of cutting-edge solid-state materials. When he’s away from his keyboard, Cristian can be found climbing the crags of Western Massachusetts, biking through the Pioneer Valley’s rail trails, chatting up the fine folks at Raven’s Used Books, or pumping some good, old-fashioned iron at the UMass Rec Center.

George Coulouras is a Technical Writing Intern at UMass Amherst contributing to Unity’s documentation. He started as an intern in February 2026. George is going into his senior year at UMass Amherst, where he is pursuing an English and Economics dual degree with a minor in Psychology, along with a certificate in Professional Writing and Technical Communication. In his free time, George enjoys going to the gym and writing for the UMass school newspaper, the Massachusetts Daily Collegian.

Georgia Stuart is an HPC Research Scientist and Facilitator at UMass Amherst. She’s particularly interested in HPC workflows, how people interact with HPC systems, and uncertainty quantification. Georgia received her PhD in mathematics from The University of Texas at Dallas where she worked on computationally efficient uncertainty quantification for seismic inversion. She was a Peter O’Donnell, Jr. Postdoctoral Fellow at UT Austin, where she worked on oil spill uncertainty quantification for the Computational Hydraulics Group. Georgia spends her free time playing with her young son, taking long walks with her family, and practicing calligraphy and lettering.

Hojae Son is a PhD student at UMass Amherst. He previously worked at an industrial research group, developing AI SDK. His current research field is System for Machine Learning and Distributed System, and he is passionate about software design and testing in general. He enjoys listening to music and watching EFL soccer games

Injila Rasul is a Research Assistant with the Unity Facilitation team. She also works on the design and development of educational material required for the Center for Data Science. Her work focuses on testing and researching AI chatbots that facilitate the user channels, creating professional development workshops for teachers that introduce them to research computing, and reviewing existing educational courses and materials that the facilitators use. Injila is earning an education doctorate at UMass Amherst in Math, Science and Learning Technologies, with a specialization in Statistical and Computational Data Science. In her free time, she likes to read, swim, garden, and paint.

Jason Vailionis is a PhD student at the University of Rhode Island and has been a Research Assistant with Unity since the Fall 2025 semester. His research centers on developing computational approaches to better understand biological systems, with a focus on cellular modeling and simulation techniques. In his free time, he enjoys traveling, exploring nature, playing video games, and spending time with friends.

Lauren Saloio is a Research Fellow at UMass Amherst. In addition to managing Unity’s documentation and Research Computing & Data’s communications, Lauren manages marketing and communications for the Center for Data Science. Before graduating from UMass Amherst in 2023, she interned at the Center for Data Science as a Technical Writer and discovered her passion for technical writing, web management, and communications. After graduating, Lauren spent the summer interning at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center as a Technical Writer. Lauren enjoys reading, writing, spending time with her family and friends, browsing bookstores, and visiting coffee shops.

Maedeh Hosseinpour, who goes by Mana, joined Unity in May 2026 as a Research Assistant. She is a PhD student in Computer Science and Statistics at the University of Rhode Island, with a background in IT Management and Electronic Business. Her research focuses on human-computer interaction, developing accessibility tools for reading, and LLM-based text simplification, with additional interests in data mining and analytics. In her free time, Maedeh enjoys cooking, playing piano, and doing jigsaw puzzles.

Shivan Kamugisha is a PhD student at UMass Amherst. She joined Unity in the Spring 2024 semester as a Research Assistant. She has a research background in hydrological and ecological modeling. Her research computing interests are data modeling and simulation, optimization modeling, and machine learning for conservation. She enjoys music and dancing.