Our Team

SD3 is a research software engineering group at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. We design, build, deliver, and operate software for research projects across campus and beyond.

Rob Kooper

Group Lead, Lead Research Software Engineer

Rob holds an engineering degree (Ir.) in Computer Science from Delft University of Technology and an M.S. in Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he worked at the GVU Center on virtual reality and augmented reality systems. At NCSA since 2000, he has led the development of open source scientific software including Cyberintegrator, Medici, Clowder, and the Brown Dog data transformation service.

Today Rob leads the SD3 group, which designs, delivers, and operates research software for NCSA and campus partners. His current work centers on running scientific platforms as cloud-native services on Kubernetes: the data and analysis infrastructure for MarginDx, the IN-CORE community resilience platform, the Interactive Notebooks service that provides hosted Jupyter, RStudio, and VS Code to Illinois researchers, and Lumen, an AI gateway that fronts campus large language models. He remains a core developer of the PEcAn ecosystem modeling project, where he maintains its containerized deployment and workflow infrastructure.

Current projects: MarginDx, PEcAn, IN-CORE, Lumen, and Interactive Notebooks.

Marcos Frenkel

Research Software Engineer

Marcos is a research software engineer at NCSA with a background in physics and a focus on quantum computing. He works on software and infrastructure that make quantum computing resources and simulation tools accessible to researchers.

He also contributes to the analysis and data infrastructure for MarginDx.

Current projects: MarginDx.

Douglas Friedel

Senior Research Software Engineer

Doug earned his Ph.D. in Astronomy from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, studying interstellar chemistry with millimeter-wave radio telescopes. He spent many years as a research scientist supporting the CARMA radio observatory and contributing to astronomical data reduction software before moving to NCSA.

At NCSA he has worked on data management and processing pipelines for large astronomy surveys, including the Dark Energy Survey, and brings deep experience in scientific data pipelines and software quality to the group.

Benjamin Galewsky

Senior Research Software Engineer

Ben came to NCSA after a long career as a software architect in industry. He is a lead developer of ServiceX, the data delivery service for the IRIS-HEP institute that serves high energy physics data from the Large Hadron Collider experiments, and is active in the HEP Software Foundation and the US Research Software Engineer Association.

His work centers on Kubernetes-based services, Python data pipelines, and cloud infrastructure for large scientific collaborations.

Yong Wook Kim

Senior Research Software Engineer

Yong Wook holds a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign with a background in civil engineering and geographic information systems. He has been at NCSA since 2007, where he was a developer of the MAEviz and Ergo hazard modeling platforms, the predecessors of IN-CORE.

He is a lead developer of IN-CORE and its pyincore Python library, specializing in geospatial data services and hazard analysis, and contributes to the data infrastructure for MarginDx.

Current projects: MarginDx and IN-CORE.

Sara Lambert

Senior Research Software Engineer

Sara is a full-stack research software engineer at NCSA with experience across web front ends, backend services, and container orchestration. She has been a core developer of the Labs Workbench platform, which provides browser-based research environments on Kubernetes, and of the Clowder research data management system.

Her work focuses on making research software easy to deploy and operate, from Helm charts and CI pipelines to user-facing interfaces.

Minu Mathew

Research Software Engineer

Minu holds a master's degree in computer science and joined NCSA as a research software engineer focused on applied machine learning and web applications.

She is a core developer of Illinois Chat, the campus generative AI service, working on retrieval-augmented generation, document ingestion, and the user-facing application, and contributes to the software infrastructure for MarginDx.

Current projects: MarginDx and Illinois Chat.

Henry Priest

Research Software Engineer

Henry is a computational biologist turned research software engineer. He holds a Ph.D. in Molecular and Cellular Biology from Oregon State University and spent a decade in plant genomics, including at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, building bioinformatics pipelines and analysis infrastructure for large sequencing and transcriptomics datasets.

At NCSA he works on the PEcAn ecosystem modeling project and on the Interactive Notebooks service, bringing his background in reproducible scientific workflows to both.

Current projects: PEcAn and Interactive Notebooks.