Do you help researchers using IT tools to further their research goals?
Are you involved in research computing and/or data science training?
Do you consult with researchers on more effectively doing their research with advanced computing resources?
Compute with data?
The Researcher-Facing Track of the People Network brings together people from research computing groups, libraries, research institutes, and other organizations who support researchers in every phase of the research lifecycle. Many of us are also Data- & Systems-Facing, but this track is a community-led opportunity to discuss the practices, perspectives, and experiences of facilitation from any perspective.
Topics include:
- Research computing facilitation
- Outreach to all disciplines, esp. those under-represented, to aid with research computing resources
- Education and training
- The art and practice of facilitation
- Increasing communications, collaborations, and team-building
- Research computing UX and user-facing tech
- And more, as determined by our members!
We connect via monthly calls and an email list. We also invite you to review and contribute to the Leading Practices of Facilitation!
Join Us!
Join Us! Create a membership profile to let us know who you are and what you’re interested in. You can add other People Network Tracks at the same time.
Monthly Calls
Monthly calls are on the second Thursday of the month, 1PM ET/ 12PM CT/ 11AM MT/ 10AM PT. Connection information and links to any materials are distributed via the Researcher-Facing email list.
Upcoming Call(s)
Title: Nextflow at Scale: Building, Tuning, and Supporting Pipelines on Shared HPC
Date: November 12, 2026, 1:00 PM ET
Abstract:
Topic: Nextflow at Scale: Building, Tuning, and Supporting Pipelines on Shared HPC
Description:
Nextflow is an open-source workflow manager that links tools into reproducible pipelines and runs them in parallel on laptops, HPC clusters, or the cloud. This session covers pipeline construction, using Nextflow’s job trace data (and possibly AI) to optimize resource requests, and how institutions deliver Nextflow, whether per user or centralized. Bring your questions and experiences to share, especially on optimization.
Track Coordination
The R-F Track Committee is looking for new members as well. Please send us an email if you are interested in supporting our monthly calls – rf-coordinators@carcc.org.
Track co-Coordinators (rf-coordinators@carcc.org):
- Stephen Oglesby, Tulane University
- Nannan Shan, Purdue University
Track Committee members:
- Justin Booth, Senior Manager, Research Cyberinfrastructure, Michigan State University
- Katia Bulekova
- Tobin Magle
- Martin Cuma
- Calvin Cox
- William Lai
We also wish to thank persons who have previously lead and contributed to the Researcher-Facing track:
Former Track Coordinators:
- Dana Brunson (Internet2)
- Bob Freeman (Harvard University)
- Lauren Michael (then UW-Madison)
- Claire Mizumoto (U. California, San Diego)
- Justin Booth, Senior Manager, Research Cyberinfrastructure, Michigan State University
Former Track Committee Members:
- Christina Koch (UW-Madison)
- Dirk Colbry (Michigan State University)
- Lauren Michael (then UW-Madison)
- Amy Neeser (UC Berkeley)
- Janna Ore Nugent (Northwestern)
- Wirawan Purwanto (Old Dominion University)
- Erin Shaw (USC)
- Kurt Showmaker (Jackson Laboratory)
- Annelie Rugg (UCLA)
- Carrie Brown (Penn State)
- Gladys Karina Andino Bautista (University of Virginia)
Previous Calls
| 6/11/2026 | Should Your Institution Host an Open Source LLM? | video doc |
| 5/14/2026 | Supporting Research Core Facilities | video doc |
| 4/9/2026 | Platform X – Scalable, Sustainable Infrastructure | video doc slides |
| 3/17/2026 | Joint Call: Researcher-Facing & RCD Workforce Development Interest Group | video doc slides |
| 2/12/2026 | AI-assisted coding tools in Research Computing | video doc |
| 11/13/2025 | Montana State University’s Research Alliance: a New Way to Support Research | video doc slides |
| 9/11/2025 | Community Discussion on AI Facilitation | No video doc |
| 8/14/2025 | Highlights from PEARC25 in O-H-I-O ! | No video doc |
| 7/10/2025 | Effective Compute Resource Utilization | video doc |
| 5/8/2025 | Accessibility in Action: Simplifying Language and Enhancing Web Inclusivity | video doc |
| 4/10/2025 | Software Installation Strategies Panel – Joint Call with Systems-Facing Track | No video doc |
| 3/13/2025 | Research Security Facilitation, Community Discussion | No video doc |
| 2/13/2025 | AlphaFold – what it is an how to support it | video doc Slides Introduction to AlphaFold – Justin Bosch Slides Alphafold & Friends – Martin Cuma Slides Alphafold 3 – Brian Gregor |
| 1/9/2025 | Planning for the new year! 2025 call topic | No video doc |
| 11/14/2024 | Research Process Automation with Globus | video slides doc |
| 10/10/2024 | Ask Your Researcher-Facing Peers: What Are You Doing About Cybersecurity? | No video doc |
| 09/12/2024 | Spack: A package manager for supercomputers | video doc |
| 08/15/2024 | PEARC ‘24 Recap |
doc |
| 06/13/2024 | ACCESS Pegasus – A hosted workflow system for ACCESS users | slides doc |
| 05/09/2024 | Open On Demand: Improvements and Recent developments | video doc |
| 04/11/2024 | Generative Artificial Intelligence Tools: A Panel Discussion | video doc |
| 03/14/2024 | The Open Science Pool (OSPool) and OSG Services | video doc |
| 02/08/2024 | JetStream2 – Researcher-Facing Resources and Support. | video doc |
| 01/12/2024 | What’s Cool in 2024 | video doc |
| 11/09/2023 | Exploring the Frontiers of CyberGIS and Geospatial Data Science | video doc |
| 10/12/2023 | Amazon Lightsail for Research | video doc slides |
| 09/14/2023 | Supporting Humanities Researchers: Roadblocks and Opportunities | video doc slides |
| 08/11/2023 | Evolution of Containers for HPC | video doc slides |
| 06/08/2023 | ACCESS Allocation Services: National cyberinfrastructure for research, development, and education | no video doc slides |
| 05/11/2023 | Current Research on Accessible Computing | video doc |
| 03/9/2023 | STRIDES, Cloud Service Program at The National Institute of Health | video doc slides |
| 02/08/2023 | ACCESS Support Empowers Your Needs | video doc slides |
| 01/12/2023 | What’s hot in 2023? | video doc slides |
| 11/10/2022 | Intellectual Property and Technology Transfer | video doc |
| 10/13/2022 | Research data storage | video doc slides |
| 09/08/2022 | Inter-institutional collaboration | video doc slides |
| 08/11/2022 | Highlights from PEARC22 | video doc slides |
| 06/09/2022 | Supporting researchers with the NIH Data Management and Sharing Plan Requirement | video doc slides |
| 04/14/2022 | Supporting Research Data Management | video doc slides |
| 03/10/2022 | Part 2: Sensitive Data in Research Computing – Through Cloud Services | video doc slides |
| 02/10/2022 | Sensitive Data in Research Computing – HIPAA support at the University of Utah | video doc slides |
| 01/13/2022 | Saying No! When, Why, and How to Say No to Researchers | video doc slides |
| 12/09/2021 | CaRCC/People Network End-of-Year Party | doc |
| 11/11/2021 | Supporting GPU computing | video doc slides |
| 10/14/2021 | Series on Leading Practices of Facilitation: Part 2: Improving our People-Facing Skills: Revisiting the Leading Practices of Facilitation | video doc slides |
| 09/09/2021 | Bridging the Gap: Reaching Underrepresented Research Domains for Large-Scale Computing | video doc slides |
| 07/08/2021 | Building Teams with Graduate Student Research Facilitators | video doc |
| 06/10/2021 | No call. Virtual Residency week | |
| 05/13/2021 | Workflow Tools for Portable, Reproducible Data Analysis | video – recording starts mid-call due to problems at the start doc slides |
| 04/08/2021 | On Measuring the Impact of Training | video doc slides |
| 03/11/2021 | All About Orienting Researchers to Research Computing + Data Resources | video doc |
| 02/11/2021 | Supporting Researchers with Containers | video doc slides |
| 01/14/2021 | All About CaRCC (… beyond the R-F Track) | video doc |
| 12/10/2020 | CaRCC End-Of-Year Party |
doc |
| 11/12/2020 | Profiling and Optimizing R Code in Your Workloads | video doc slides |
| 10/08/2020 | Writing More Equitable Job Postings | video doc slides |
| 09/10/2020 | Supporting research projects on the cloud | video unavailable doc slides |
| 07/09/2020 | Big Data, Big Compute Solutions, a Community Discussion | video doc slides |
| 05/14/2020 | Remote Support (cont’d): Working with Your Team Remotely | video doc |
| 04/09/2020 | Sharing Good Practices in Remote User Support & Training | video doc |
| 03/12/2020 | User Support via Ask.CI and Locales | video doc |
| 02/13/2020 | Doing it in public: User support via Slack, open forums, Github repos and blogs | video doc |
| 01/09/2020 | Handling Support Requests – A Community Discussion | video doc |
| 12/12/2019 | University of Missouri reports and Researcher Facing/CI-Engineer Metrics | video doc |
| 11/14/2019 | Open OnDemand User Experiences & Challenges | video doc |
| 10/10/2019 | An Expansion of User Support Services for the Research Computing Group at the University of Colorado Boulder | video slides doc |
| 09/12/2019 | A Startup Framework for Building Digital Research Capacity and Community at UCLA | doc slides |
| 08/08/2019 | PEARC19 recap! | doc |
| 07/11/2019 | Creating effective training materials | doc |
| 06/13/2019 | Lightning talks / Open mic sessions on track topics | doc slides |