RCC collaborator Jake Carroll has won this year's UQ Award for Excellence in the 'Innovation' category.
UQ Vice-Chancellor and President Prof. Peter Høj presented Jake, Associate Director – Research Computing, UQ Institutes, with the award at a ceremony on Monday, 2 July.
“It’s terrific to see Jake’s ingenuity and energy recognised,” said RCC Director Prof. David Abramson. “He has worked very closely with RCC for some time, but the recent effort on MeDiCI and Wiener is outstanding. I have come to rely on his technical prowess and collaborative spirit, and look forward to having him involved in RCC projects in the future.”
Working with RCC, Jake has been a key figure in creating next-generation research computing infrastructure to ensure UQ's world-class researchers can operate unencumbered by technical limitations.
Today's cutting-edge science generates huge data sets, and an inability to efficiently handle this data creates a bottleneck that can restrict researchers' productivity.
The award announcement in UQ Update said: “Jake has worked tirelessly to design and implement a suite of high-performance computing technologies that overcomes this bottleneck. This required unique problem-solving abilities, the skill to facilitate and nurture productive relationships with researchers and suppliers, and a peerless work ethic.
“UQ therefore now sits at the forefront of research computing infrastructure, with researchers across multiple departments and institutes benefiting. Jake's dedication, innovation and creativity have raised the ceiling of our researchers' efficiency and productivity, letting them maximise the time and energy they can dedicate to tomorrow's discoveries.”
Jake said winning the award consolidated, symbolically, many years of prolonged effort. “The award helped me to appreciate the impact that I and my team have had on accelerating time-to-discovery, and just how much we've helped to enable that for UQ.
“RCC has been a collegiate, resilient, long-term and powerful ally in helping to bring all of this to bear for UQ's largest and most intensive scientific research institutes. Working together, we have achieved several world firsts in eResearch infrastructure, accelerating critical research, empowering our researchers and giving them every possibility and opportunity to shine. We have, together, fostered a vibrant community of engineering, scientific and technical people — all focused on delivering the very best, cutting-edge facilities to make our organisation a world leader in scientific research,” said Jake.
RCC congratulates Jake on his well-deserved award, and we look forward to continuing to collaborate with him and his team on further improvements to UQ’s research computing infrastructure.
