New to Computing Sciences - March 2012

Pardeep Pall, Visualization and Analytics Group

This month Pardeep Pall joins Berkeley Lab's visualization and analytics group as a Computer Systems Engineer. Using software developed at the Berkeley Lab, Pall will analyze extreme weather events in large sets of climate data to examine the capabilities of the software.

"This work may be useful given the increasingly large and more detailed amounts of data being produced in the climate community," says Pall.

Before joining Berkeley Lab, Pall spent most of his postdoc years in the United Kingdom and Switzerland studying large sets of climate model data under the umbrella of the climateprediction.net project, which makes use of publicly volunteered computing time, around the world, to generate thousands of climate model simulations that would otherwise require supercomputers to compute. Pall's work focused on determining whether the risk of damaging extreme weather related events, such as floods, are affected by anthropogenic climate change.

A native of the United Kingdom, Pall earned his undergraduate degree in physics at University College London and his doctorate in atmospheric physics at Oxford University. Because Pall is new to the Bay Area, he currently spends much of his free time exploring and acclimatizing to the region.

James Lee, Computing Sciences IT Infrastructure Team Lead

This month, James Lee returns to Berkeley Lab as the new Computing Sciences IT Infrastructure Team Lead. In this role, he will deploy and support IT resources, as well as establish a technology strategy for the Computational Research Division and Computing Sciences Directorate.

Lee began his Berkeley Lab career at NERSC—exactly 14 years ago, in March 1998—as part of the Computer Operations and ESnet Support group. Shortly after, he moved into NERSC's Storage Systems Group. From 2000 to 2011, he worked in the Berkeley Lab's Information Technologies Division.

"In the IT Division, I helped manage and support the Lab's central email, LDAP, web, and collaboration services for over 10 years," says Lee. "This gave me a broad range of experience planning and executing projects, solving complex technical problems, and providing mission-critical services for a large number of users."

Lee notes that his interest in computing began at age 11, when a school program introduced students to the Commodore PET computer that used a cassette tape for data storage. A native of Pleasant Hill, California, Lee continues to lives there now with his wife and four-year old daughter. In his spare time, Lee enjoys hiking, driving on twisty back roads, and teaching his daughter to use Google Voice Search on the iPhone and iPad to research things she wants to learn more about.