About the Board

The ResearchSOC project is guided by a six-person Stakeholder Advisory Board (SAB) from the R&E community. 

• Dr. Dana Brunson, Oklahoma State University assistant vice president for research cyberinfrastructure and director of the OSU High Performance Computing Center
• Douglas Ertz, project manager at UNAVCO/GAGE
• Dr. David Halstead, chief information officer at NRAO
• Dr. Sean Peisert, staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
• Susan Ramsey, risk assessor and security engineer at the National Center for Atmospheric Research
• Cheryl Washington, chief information security officer at University of California, Davis

The SAB provides us with clear feedback from diverse perspectives: two NSF Large Facilities that are initial adopters (Ernst, Halstead), a university research computing center leader (Brunson), a cybersecurity leader from an NSF Large Facility (Ramsey), a cybersecurity researcher (Peisert), and a university CISO (Washington). The SAB is convened during the year by teleconference and in person. The SAB is presented with an update on ResearchSOC progress and issues. Their guidance is then incorporated into our planning and shared with NSF in our reporting.

Board members

Dana Brunson

Dana Brunson is assistant vice president for research cyberinfrastructure, director of the Oklahoma State University High Performance Computing Center (OSUHPCC), adjunct associate professor in the Department of Mathematics and in the Department of Computer Science.  She also co-leads OneOklahoma Cyberinfrastructure Initiative (OneOCII) and the XSEDE Campus Engagement program, which includes the Campus Champions.

She earned her Ph.D. in Mathematics at the University of Texas at Austin in 2005 and her M.S. and B.S. in Mathematics from OSU. She is PI on OSU's 2011 and 2015 National Science Foundation (NSF) Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) grants for High Performance Compute clusters for multidisciplinary computational and data-intensive research. She is also co-PI on Oklahoma's NSF Campus Cyberinfrastructure - Network Infrastructure and Engineering CC-NIE grant, "OneOklahoma Friction Free Network" (OFFN), a collaboration among OSU, OU, Langston University and the Tandy Supercomputing Center of the Oklahoma Innovation Institute.

Dr. Brunson is also a member of the Campus Research Computing Consortium (CaRCC) Council, serves on Internet2’s External Advisory Group on Researcher Engagement, the Cyberinfrastructure program committee for the Great Plains Network, and Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center’s Bridges external advisory board. 

Doug Ertz

Doug Ertz is a project manager III where he leads the IT and a software development group.  Doug started his career at NASA in Houston before returning for his M.S. in Computer Science. After working for Bell Labs for over 9 years, he moved to U S WEST where he developed low cost 9-1-1 systems with adjunct processors and led the development effort for an operational support system for voice messaging. After leaving U S WEST, Doug joined Intrado Corp. leading a software team that implemented and supported next generation E9-1-1 systems.  He joined UNAVCO in 2014 in his current position.

David Halstead

DAVID HALSTEAD is the CIO for the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. After obtaining a Ph.D. in the computational simulation of surface catalysis in 1990, he moved to HPC research at the DOE Scalable Computing Laboratory in Ames Lab, implementing commodity parallel processing cluster solutions to benefit research in surface science, chemistry, physics and biology. In 2002 he moved into industry with Celera Genomics to drive the Strategic Platform Initiative; transitioning away from the costly leased computer systems used to sequence the human genome, to scalable HPC systems supporting proteomics and therapeutics research. Since joining NRAO in 2008, his responsibilities are divided between Data Management for the Observatory’s HPC infrastructure in support of the national radio telescopes, and the general IT support for NRAO’s 500+ employees. He has served on the committees for SC94, SC99, SC05, SC10; SC13; SC14; SC16 and is a founding member of the ACM’s SIGHPC Education Chapter.

Sean Peisert

Dr. Sean Peisert is jointly appointed as a staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; chief cybersecurity strategist at CENIC; associate adjunct professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Davis and of Public Health Sciences at the University of California, Davis School of Medicine; and as a Senior Fellow at the Berkeley Institute for Data Science.

His research and development interests cover a broad cross-section of usable and useful computer and network security solutions. In recent years, Dr. Peisert's R&D has focused on developing security techniques that improve and enable the use of distributed, high-performance, and cloud computing resources to conduct scientific research, and improving the secure functioning of power grid control systems.

At CENIC, he is responsible for cybersecurity strategy and implementation for CENIC's enterprise as well as for CalREN, a high-capacity network designed to meet the unique requirements of CENIC's constituent population of over 10,000 institutions and 20 million users, including all of the University of California, the California State University system, the California Community College system, the Naval Postgraduate School, Stanford, Caltech, and USC (including all of the academic medical centers); the California K-12 system; the California Public Library system; the Exploratorium; SFJAZZ; the California Academy of Sciences; and the Cities of Los Angeles, San Francisco, Sacramento, and Alameda.

Professor Peisert is chair of the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Security & Privacy; associate editor-in-chief of IEEE Security & Privacy; a steering committee member and past general chair of the New Security Paradigms Workshop (NSPW); steering committee member and past program co-chair of the Workshop on Cyber Security Experimentation and Test (CSET); and past general chair for the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, the flagship conference for security research.

Susan Ramsey

Susan Ramsey is a risk assessor and security engineer at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. She has over twenty years of experience building enterprise infrastructure and cloud computing. She joined NCAR in 2014 and promptly launched multiple initiatives to tackle compliance and identity management. Her latest projects include building a FISMA moderate segment and an organization wide Continuous Monitoring Plan. She has an M.S. in Computer Information Technology from Regis University, (thesis on Vulnerability Assessment). She is currently working towards a second M.S. in information security engineering, from SANS Technical Institute.

Cheryl Washington

Cheryl Washington is CISO of University of California, Davis.