Drew Paine, a User Experience Research Lead in the Scientific Data Division (SciData), has been selected as a fellow by the Better Scientific Software program (BSSw). The Better Scientific Software Fellowship Program aims to foster and promote practices, processes, and tools to improve developer productivity and software sustainability of scientific codes. Each BSSw Fellow receives $25,000 for an activity promoting better scientific software in their community.
Currently, Paine leads a variety of product and user experience research (UXR) efforts at Berkeley Lab. These include his work on the STRUDEL, a project focused on building usable scientific web app resources. He also leads work on the requirements and workflow user experience for the Department of Energy High Performance Data Facility (HPDF) project as well as Trusted CI’s cyberinfrastructure AI efforts. Paine says, “My career has been driven by continued curiosity in the ways people collaborate to do complex work across computing ecosystems.”
As an active member of the BSSw, US-RSE, and CASS communities, Paine advocates for improving user and developer experiences in scientific software infrastructure efforts so that research work can be accomplished in a more reliable, productive, and effective manner. As a BSSw Fellow, Paine plans to develop an online open community hub, UX in Science, that coalesces and advocates resources for scientific user experience (UX) knowledge and resources. “This hub will enable two goals,” Paine explains, “First, it will help existing working groups and teams across organizations more formally share their efforts and outputs to grow the burgeoning scientific UX community. Second, UX in Science will provide a curated environment so that the broader scientific software development communities (such as BSSw) can access a wide range of trusted information. This will help scientific software developers more easily be able to learn new skills that advance their own practices in resource limited environments, furthering workforce development.”
Learn more about Paine’s work in the SciData Division in our ongoing column, Expert Insights.
The Better Scientific Software Fellowship Program is a collaborative effort of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Office of Advanced Scientific Research and the National Nuclear Security Administration Advanced Simulation and Computing Program; and by the National Science Foundation (NSF). The program is supported by Sustainable Horizons Institute.
About Computing Sciences at Berkeley Lab
High performance computing plays a critical role in scientific discovery. Researchers increasingly rely on advances in computer science, mathematics, computational science, data science, and large-scale computing and networking to increase our understanding of ourselves, our planet, and our universe. Berkeley Lab's Computing Sciences Area researches, develops, and deploys new foundations, tools, and technologies to meet these needs and to advance research across a broad range of scientific disciplines.
