We are excited to introduce the 2025–2026 Emerging Leaders Cohort of the Midwest Research Computing and Data (RCD) community! This inaugural cohort brings together a diverse group of professionals dedicated to advancing research computing, supporting researchers across disciplines, and shaping the future of RCD as an emerging profession.

Over the coming year, cohort members will engage in shared learning experiences, explore organizational structures and funding mechanisms across institutions, and collaborate to promote RCD as a vibrant career path for students and early-career professionals.

Meet the members of this year’s cohort:

Casey Schacher

Casey Schacher supports campus research at University of Wisconsin – Madison by helping researchers and their departmental IT integrate data storage and transfer services into their workflows. Casey works as the service lead for the Research Drive, Research Object Storage (S3), and Globus services as part of the Research Cyberinfrastructure team within the Division of Information Technology (DoIT). She has an MS in Data Science and an MA in Information Science & Learning Technologies. Prior to joining DoIT in 2022, Casey worked for over a decade as a librarian at UW-Madison Libraries.

Christy Henzler

Christy Henzler is a Co-Director of Research Informatics at the Minnesota Supercomputing Institute (MSI), part of Research Computing at the University of Minnesota. Christy provides strategic direction and leadership for the bioinformatics group at MSI, which provides a full range of bioinformatics support to researchers, from troubleshooting and tutorials to full-scale collaborative data analysis.  She has a wide-ranging background in biology and bioinformatics data analysis, including transcriptomic, spatialomic, genomic and epigenomic data analysis. Christy received a B.Sc. in Biology from Cornell University and Ph.D. in Biology from Duke University.

David Glass

David Glass has a background in a variety of Information Technology and Data Science roles. Working in industry for 10 years, their roles focused on the realm of support IT and later data science. After moving from industry to academia, they were a member of The Data Mine team at Purdue University. Helping to connect students with meaningful industry projects focusing on data science. Currently, they work as the Lead of the Research Computing Support team as part of the Research Computing and Data Services organization at Northwestern University.  His focus includes enhancing the delivery of support to computational research, project management, team collaboration initiatives, and student program facilitation. David’s biggest passion has been learning from others and helping to provide career opportunities to employees who work in data science and IT. David enjoys cooking, biking to work, music, and supports Arsenal Football Club.

Eric Bellmore

Eric Bellmore currently serves as the Director of Academic Research Computing at Grand Valley State University. A “Higher Ed Lifer” as he calls himself, Eric has worn many hats during his career across multiple institutions. He holds both a B.S. and a M.S. from Central Michigan University and looks to continue his growth both personally and professionally through formal education and experience.

Giang Rudderham

Giang Rudderham is a Data Science Consultant for Information Technology Services – Research Services at the University of Iowa. Since 2019, she has been a co-service owner of the interactive cluster at Iowa, which provides high-performance computing resources for over 1,000 researchers and students each semester. Giang provides computational support for users, teaches workshops in R and Python, and collaborates with campus partners to enhance users’ experience with IT for research. She enjoys fostering growth and collaborations, having supervised and coached both students and full-time staff.

Prior to her experience in research computing, Giangwas a Data Manager for the Iowa Social Science Research Center, where she led technical implementation of survey research projects. Early inher career, she focused on interdisciplinary social science research. Giang has co-authored and presented research papers at international conferences, including conferences of the EuropeanSurvey Research Association and the Joint Statistical Meetings.  Giang earned a B.A. in Mathematics from the College of Wooster and an M.S. in Statistics from the University of Iowa.

James Cannon

James Cannon supports high-performance computing and research data management at the University of Michigan. His expertise spans research data infrastructure and the application of artificial intelligence in scientific research. He holds a B.A. from Columbia University and is pursuing graduate studies in data science at the University of Edinburgh.

Tyler Bauer

Tyler Bauer has been the full-time system administrator for high-performance computing at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire for the past 3 1/2 years, after finishing two years in similar role as a student employee. After working at a small website development agency as a lead developer for eight years, he went back to school to obtain my Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from UW-Eau Claire.  Over the past several years, he’s grown to really appreciate the computational side of research, and one of my favorite activities is meeting directly with faculty and students and hearing about their projects and how HPC makes a difference to their work. He also really likes to experiment with new technologies and ideas, some home-grown, to improve ease-of-access to our campus cyberinfrastructure.

Amiya Maji

Amiya Maji works as a Lead Computational Scientist at RCAC at Purdue University where he collaborates with faculty and researchers from various scientific disciplines to optimize their scientific codes and workflows, facilitates automated deployment of scientific applications on the high-performance computing clusters at Purdue, and trains students and early career researchers in high-performance computing. Most notably, Amiya has been a lead computer scientist for automated deployment, testing and benchmarking of scientific applications on the NSF-funded ($10M) supercomputer, Anvil, which is serving 5000+ researchers across the country through the ACCESS program.

Prior to joining RCAC, Amiya finished his Ph.D. in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University focusing on software reliability and security. His research on cloud computing, IoT, and HPC have received recognition from national and international organizations over the years. Amiya’s work on Android reliability exposed many vulnerabilities in the popular mobile OS and received the DSN Test of Time award (2022) by the IEEE Technical Committee on Dependable Computing and Fault Tolerance.

Amiya’s research on cloud performance anomaly detection and mitigation received the ACM Middleware Test-of-Time (2014–2024) Award and was granted an US patent (2019). In the HPC domain, Amiya’s work on HPC application packaging was recognized with the Better Scientific Software (BSSw) fellowship (2022) sponsored by the US DOE and NSF.

As part of the MWRCD Emerging Leaders Program, Amiya’s goals are to understand the diverse organizational structures that are present across academic institutions in the US, to understand the funding mechanisms supporting RCD professionals, and to promote RCD as an emerging profession among graduates. In his spare time, Amiya enjoys gardening, cooking, and translating baby language into plain English (not necessarily in that order).

Discover more from

Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.

Categories: