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UT Hosts BRICCs Cyberinfrastructure Workshop

The University of Tennessee hosted a workshop this month for the Building Research Innovation at Community Colleges (BRICCs)-Pathways project.

Held December 9–10 at the UT Student Union, the event focused on developing roadmaps for under-resourced institutions to grow cyberinfrastructure programs, fostering regional collaborations, and highlighting the differences and similarities between smaller institutions and research-intensive universities in regard to mission, funding culture, and business processes.

attendees and speakers at the BRICCS conference

The workshop drew more than 45 attendees, with extensive representation from institutions in Tennessee. The agenda included a variety of panels and activities. Among the keynote speakers were:

  • Lynne Parker, associate vice chancellor emerita at UT
  • Jenny Li, program director at the Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) at the National Science Foundation
  • Michele Robinson, senior director for the NCyTE Center
  • Vasileios Maroulas, UT’s associate vice chancellor for research

“I was very excited to bring the inaugural BRICCs-Pathways workshop to Tennessee”, said Tabitha Samuel, the deputy director and operations group leader for UT’s National Institute for Computational Sciences (NICS) and a co-principal investigator for the BRICCs-Pathways project. “There was a lot of engaging discussion from participants that led to new understandings of their research and computing landscapes. It was heartening to see the many Tennessee institutions represented at the workshop and new collaborations springing from this event.”

attendees standing in rows in front of a projector screen at the BRICCS conference

Supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the BRICCs-Pathways: Establishing Pathways for Regional Computing project aims to provide advanced cyberinfrastructure (CI) resources to support research and education at two-year institutions, particularly community colleges. The initiative builds on previous BRICCs efforts and focuses on developing regional computing models that can be scaled and shared across institutions.

Dhruva Chakravorty, director of user services and research at Texas A&M University, is the principal investigator of the project.

A paper that was co-authored by Samuel about BRICCs won two awards at the ACM-PEARC Conference in July.

Contact

Rhiannon Potkey (865-974-0683, rpotkey@utk.edu)