Our People

Our people are what make SciNet special.  Let us introduce you to our team.


Dr. Daniel Gruner, CTO
Daniel has more than twenty years’ experience working with a variety of programming languages, parallel computing, scientific modeling, software architecture, and administration and architecture of large Beowulf clusters and large shared-memory parallel computers. He has a doctorate in chemical physics from the University of Toronto.
Dr. Joseph Chen, Associate CTO Hardware and Operations
Joseph has earned his doctoral degree in computer science with magna cum laude at the University of Hamburg, Germany and worked there as research assistant post-doc fellow for three and a half years. Before becoming Scinet’s Associate CTO for Hardware and Operations, he was a Systems Administrator at SciNet, and the High Performance Parallel Cluster Administrator at the University of Toronto’s Institute for Aerospace Studies (UTIAS).
Jaime Pinto, Storage Analyst/Scientific Programmer Analyst
Jaime has an Aeronautical Engineering, Computer Science and Commerce background. A seasoned professional, he has a history of successful IT engagements, with focus and dedication to customer service and satisfaction, working for organizations such as Spin Productions, IMAX, RIM, and prior to SciNet in a research environment at The Hospital for Sick Children and Mount Sinai Hospital. He has a particular interest on financial models and wealth management strategies.
Dr. Ching-Hsing Yu, HPC Administrator
Ching-Hsing obtained his PhD in Theoretical Chemistry. He has extensive experience in HPC, ab initio calculations, and molecular dynamics simulations.
Dr. Leslie Groer, ATLAS
Leslie is the manager of the SciNet Atlas Tier-2 Computing Facility which is part of the Worldwide Large Hadron Collider Computing Grid (WLCG) Dr. Groer has conducted research at the CDF and Dzero high-energy particle experiments at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.
Dr. Ramses van Zon, HPC Applications Analyst
Ramses obtained his Ph.D. in Physics at Utrecht University, and has worked at the Rockefeller University and at the Chemical Physics Theory Group of the University of Toronto. He has extensive experience with shared memory computing, advanced algorithms for molecular dynamics, and bioinformatics computations.
Erik S_06 Dr. Erik Spence, Applications Analyst
Erik received his doctorate in plasma physics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has held postdoctoral positions at ETH-Zurich, University of Toronto and Princeton University. His research experience in parallel computation focused on fluid dynamics and magnetohydrodynamics, with an emphasis on liquid-metal experiments.
nolta Dr. Mike Nolta, Applications Analyst
Mike received his Ph.D. in Physics from Princeton University, and divides his time between SciNet and the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics. His research experience involved the reduction of massive datasets from microwave telescopes.
Marco Saldarriaga, HPC Systems Administrator
Dr. Bruno Mundim, Applications Analyst
Bruno obtained his Ph.D. in Physics at the University of British Columbia, and has worked at the Rochester Institute of Technology and the Albert-Einstein-Institut in Germany. His background is in computation astrophysics.
Vladimir Slavnic, HPC Systems Administrator
Alexey Fedoseev, Applications Analyst
Yohai Meiron, Applications Analyst
Yohai has a Ph.D. in physics and research expertise is in N-body simulations in astrophysics as well as black hole physics. He has extensive experience with GPU computing, including helping to administer a GPU cluster during his postdoc at Peking University. He is knowledgeable about Linux and programming languages, in particular Python, C++, and CUDA.
Rampravesh Sharma, Network and Security Administrator
James Willis, Application Analyst
Norbert Krawiec, Systems Administrator
Shawn Winnington-Ball, Information Systems Security
Shawn is the Information Security Systems Manager at SciNet.
Leanne De Guia, Operations Coordinator