Merge pull request #72 from CHTC/samatys-patch-5

Create 2023-11-10-rachel-lombardi-feature.md

2023-11-10-rachel-lombardi-feature.md

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+---
+title: Get to Know CHTC Research Computing Facilitator Rachel Lombardi
+
+author: Sarah Matysiak
+
+publish_on:
+  - htcondor
+  - path
+  - osg
+  - chtc
+
+type: news 
+
+canonical_url: https://chtc.cs.wisc.edu/get-to-know-rachel-lombardi.html
+
+image:
+  path: <https://raw.githubusercontent.com/CHTC/Articles/main/images/lombardihiking.png
+  alt: Rachel Lombardi hiking at Yosemite National Park during grad school at UC Davis
+
+excerpt: Staff profile of Research Computing Facilitator Rachel Lombardi
+
+---
+**Lombardi’s journey to computational research wasn’t linear, but she’s glad to have found her way to the CHTC**
+
+
+
+**Did you always know you would end up in computational research?**
+
+I always knew that I wanted to go into something science-related. 
+When I was in high school, I knew I didn't want to do medicine because 
+my family was very medicine-focused, so I explored the concept of food 
+science. I interned with Kellogg and loved food science — the process of 
+scientific discovery, the scientific side of food, and the quick production 
+aspect of it. But when I finished my internship, I had already committed 
+to the University of Michigan and decided to do four years there to get
+a B.S. in Biochemistry. When I graduated, I was still interested in 
+exploring the food science route, so I did a Ph.D. at the University of
+California, Davis, in food science. As a part of that Ph.D., I did a 
+lot of computational research involving sequencing, transcriptomics, 
+proteomics, and metabolomics. My research was focused on understanding the plant response to a deadly citrus disease.
+
+
+
+Exploring the computational side of my research ended up being more enjoyable research than the actual food science side, but since my background was in the life sciences, I struggled with the computational side. It was a fun relationship, but also very stressful trying to learn all this by myself. I ended up finding some amazing mentors outside of my lab and becoming a part of this computational research community that helped teach me skills to do my work. In the end, I appreciated them so much and I loved what they had done. I knew this was what I wanted to do — help other people do their research.
+
+
+
+
+**What was your path to becoming a research computing facilitator?**
+
+One of those communities that I was exposed to in grad school while trying to get my research done was called The Carpentries. The Carpentries provides a lot of resources for teaching computational tools, and I loved that community so much that I became an instructor for them. As a part of being an instructor, you’re also put on their mailing lists, and it was the facilitators here [the UW-Madison Center for High Throughput Computing (CHTC)] who posted this job to that mailing list. It was not even a question for me; I knew this was the job for me. I had never been to Wisconsin, never been to Madison, and it was during the pandemic. But I was like “This is what I want to do, and if they'll have me, I will go.”
+
+
+
+
+**Has coming from a biochemistry and food science background to computational research been a learning curve?**
+
+Absolutely. In some ways, it’s a huge challenge not being able to fully understand the details of what's going on with our various computation resources. But there’s such a breadth of what we do that even a computer scientist on the team may not understand every component. As someone not from computer science, it's especially difficult, but I also think that makes me much better at doing my job. It's really hard for computer scientists to distill what they know or talk to someone from biology or a different discipline who has no idea about the vocabulary and the terminology. It's really important to have a facilitator who can serve as the middleman, where I can communicate with the computer scientist but can also distill it for an individual researcher and see how that's going to apply to their research projects. It’s challenging, but it makes me better at my job.
+
+
+
+
+**What are some of your tasks and favorite parts of your role?**
+
+First of all, working with my team. This team is amazing and so encouraging, and we all learn from each other and grow from each other. It's such a supportive environment, which is really important for me. I also love working with the researchers and hearing about what a grad student or a lab is going to be diving into over the next few years as they plan or as they're mid-analysis. It's fun to be able to see what science is underway, what their results could show, and how it could help others.
+
+
+
+I love being a part of the research community, and that enthusiasm is one thing that’s important for me as part of this very interdisciplinary job. I like having my fingers in lots of different pies. I like to be able to spend part of my day learning about a tool to help a researcher and another part of my day planning a training event that's coming up — I'm not restricted to just one science domain. That hustle and bustle, interdisciplinary aspect makes every day different.
+
+
+
+
+**What are some challenges and triumphs you have faced while on the job?**
+
+Let's start with challenges. This job requires an incredible amount of flexibility and multitasking skills. Things could change in a minute: your plans for the day, your plans for the week, your plans for the month. That’s constantly happening with this job, so I need to be able to reassess priorities and help facilitate two or three different computing systems. It also requires keeping on top of what has changed with one system that hasn't changed for another. Because my background is not computer science, it’s not something that comes easily.
+
+
+
+As far as the triumphs, my triumphs are when we help make computing click for researchers. It's an exciting moment when you see that they understand what they're doing and that they understand how to apply these resources to make their research better. It’s so rewarding to see that happen and to see them meet their goals of going to a conference, getting published, or even graduating. It's rewarding because I know how hard they've worked, and I'm happy that we were there to support them.
+
+
+
+
+**What impact do you hope to have?**
+
+I want to help advance research in whatever way that I can. I feel inspired by researchers of different domains, what it [high-throughput computing] can do for people today and in the future, and how it can be all interconnected. Anything that I can do to help a researcher get their work done is my goal at the end of the day, and if that’s using our computing resources, amazing; I will help you use them. If that means not using our computing resources and telling somebody else that this is not the best way for them to get their research done, we will also be very upfront with that as well. Research can be a very isolating experience. To have that researcher know that they are being supported and that someone’s on their team as much as we can be is a goal of mine.
+
+
+
+
+**Can you tell me about your involvement with the NIAID?**
+<figure class="figure float-end" style="margin-left: 1em">
+  <img src='https://raw.githubusercontent.com/CHTC/Articles/main/images/lombardiuganda.png' height="375" width="600" class="figure-img img-fluid rounded" alt="Rachel Lombardi (left) and OSG Executive Director Frank Wuerthwein (right) in Uganda
+<br/></figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+The [OSG] has many collaborations with different government, academic, and nonprofit entities, one of them being the [National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases] (NIAID). As a part of that collaboration, I was able to go to Uganda, which was an incredible experience for so many reasons.
+
+
+
+My background is in biology, and an aspect of the government focuses on biology and sequencing analysis. I went to Uganda to lead a workshop for researchers who were part of the ACE program, which is the African Centers of Excellence, specifically in bioinformatics. I worked with the researchers there to show them how their research could benefit from using OSG resources. It was just incredible — there are so many things that are hard to grasp until you're there. They have a high-performance computing system over there that, in theory, they can use, but they don't have stable power. I would be sitting in a meeting with important leaders from universities and different U.S. computing centers, and the power shuts off. Things like that are hard to comprehend until you're there, and I grew so much from that experience. I began to understand what their challenges were and what we could do to address them.
+
+
+
+One of the questions that I still think about so much is that I was mentioning office hours in my talk as a form of support and just kept saying “Don't worry, you're not alone. We have office hours.” About midway through my talk, somebody raised their hand and asked what office hours were. That cultural difference made me reevaluate how we can provide better support for communities in the U.S. and our collaborators abroad. It also made me realize that researchers can have vast differences in their backgrounds.
+
+
+
+Some ACE students also attended the last two OSG Schools. I was able to once again work with them for a week. We’re starting to see a lot of fruition in their research and it's exciting.
+
+
+
+
+
+**How do you spend your time outside of work?**
+
+I travel a fair amount for work and fun. I'm really lucky my family is around the United States, so I almost always have some place that I can go.
+
+
+
+I enjoy the Madison art scene with friends. There's a craft fair you can almost certainly find me at.
+
+
+
+I'm getting into home improvement projects, and my apartment makes a great test bed. I've been getting fairly comfortable with power tools like saws, table saws, and miter saws.
+
+
+
+
+**What’s your favorite place you’ve traveled to?**
+
+My favorite place is probably Mackinac Island in northern Michigan. It was a place that my family would go on trips to growing up, and there’s no cars allowed on the very small island — it’s just horse-drawn carriages or bikes. All day, you just eat fudge because there are a lot of fudge-making places. I just have a lot of good and happy memories there.
+
+
+
+
+**What animal do you think embodies you?**
+
+I would be a golden retriever. I feel like golden retrievers are just really happy and get really excited about a lot of things, and I feel like I tend to get excited about a lot. They love people, they love food, and they’re just very happy dogs. My goal in life is to have a house so I can provide for my flock of goldens one day.