Research IT: New LAS program providing custom faculty research computing support

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“Research IT” is a new College of Liberal Arts and Sciences information technology program that provides individual research support for faculty.

Research IT was created to increase high performance computing, application development and other research-specific solutions for College of LAS researchers, Michael Hofmockel, new LAS Research IT director, said.

“This new endeavor by LAS IT shows the college’s commitment to the rapidly increasing IT support required for research excellence,” Hofmockel said. “We want to grow research IT support within the college.”

Research IT aims to be an advocate for researchers in the college in their individual research programs.

“This is custom support for a longer period of time,” Hofmockel added. “We are a collaborator, an advocate to help guide faculty through the many technical decisions required to execute their research.”

LAS’ IT Services focus on security, desktop software and computer lab support, said Andrew Albinger, director of LAS IT Services. “In contrast, Research IT focuses solely on individual faculty research support. This can come as high performance computing access and assistance, custom application development, optimization of existing data transformation workflows, or whatever IT support the research requires.”

Hofmockel said Research IT is simply picking up where traditional IT stops by providing a point of contact to coordinate the faculty’s custom high-end research IT needs. “Faculty may need servers dedicated or shared to execute analyses, or they may need curriculum to help them learn modern tools to better collaborate.”

UPDATED: Dec 18, 2015 For more information, please contact researchit@iastate.edu