IBEST facilities - people
The people who provide support for Bioinformatics research in the IBEST community.
Ken D. Blair, Assistant Computer Scientist kblair@uidaho.edu
Ken is our Unix Systems Administrator and guide through the vast rivers of hell. Ken's job is to provide high reliability and availability for IBEST computing hardware and software. This includes day-to-day operations, backups, systems and application software maintenance, account management, security monitoring and maintenance, and other resource management tasks. The platforms include file and software servers, web servers, a networked classroom, individual workstations, and Beowulf clusters.
Ken has over 20 years of experience in Management of Informations Systems. He has spent the last 12 years dealing primarily in educational systems design for Geophysics, Engineering, and Computer Science disciplines at both BSU and UI.
Dr. Celeste Brown, Bioinformatics Coordinator celesteb@uidaho.edu
Celeste Brown is the Bioinformatics Coordinator at the University of Idaho. Her task is to facilitate the use of bioinformatics tools, both software and hardware, among the IBEST community at UI and among the BRIN community in the state of Idaho.
Celeste’s early graduate career was in population genetics, and her PhD dissertation was on the molecular evolution of the amylase gene region of Drosophila pseudoobscura, a fruit fly native to western America. Her postdoctoral work was in gene expression (the transcriptional regulation of human alcohol dehydrogenase genes and the response of gene expression to selection in yeast genes) with forays into mouse and salmon mitochondrial DNA evolution. She was a research scientist at Washington State University studying the sequence and evolutionary properties of intrinsically disordered protein (i.e., protein that does not fold into a fixed 3D structure), and she is continuing this research at UI.
Luke Dupin, river tender
Luke is a junior Computer Science major. He deals with all things Beowulf.
Audra Johnson, river tender
Audra assists the faculty with their various projects, needs, and requsts. An undergraduate in Computer Science.
Rob Lyon, river tender
Rob is a Junior in Computer Science. He writes scripts for Ken Blair and installs applications on the servers.
Adam Lowry, river tender
Adam is an undergraduate in Computer Science. His job is to traverse the many databases of the rivers of hell.
Jason Machacek, river tender
Jason writes code for the Bioinformatics researchers and helps them in any other ways he can. He's currently an undergraduate at the University of Idaho and is studying Computer Engineering.
Trent J. Nelson, river tender
Trent is a junior in Computer Science. He has worked with Ken Blair building the IBEST network since it began. Formerly in charge of Application installation and maintenance on three Solaris servers he now maintains and improves the security of the IBEST network and systems.
