Panel: Campus Infrastructure Supporting Open Source and Research Impact
Sustainable open source that has impact outside the university requires infrastructure: specialized centers, dedicated staff, and institutional support that most research grant funding does not cover. For universities, creating this infrastructure is a direct investment in research impact and can produce widely adopted tools, high-profile collaborations, and follow-on funding, all of which strengthen a campus’s research standing and its ability to compete for major grants and partnerships. For external partners — including industry — healthy open source infrastructure on campus means direct access to emerging tools and talent, making it a high-leverage place to invest, partner, and recruit.
This panel brings together leaders from campus research centers and infrastructure programs to discuss what it takes to build and resource this kind of support, and what funders — from university administration to industry partners — stand to gain by getting behind it.
Speakers
James Davis (Moderator) is a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at UC Santa Cruz and Faculty Director of the Center for Research in Open Source Software (CROSS). His research spans computer graphics, machine vision, and applying technology to global social issues.
Jason Nielsen is a Professor of Physics at UC Santa Cruz and Director of the Santa Cruz Institute for Particle Physics (SCIPP). An experimental particle physicist, he collaborates on the ATLAS experiment at CERN's Large Hadron Collider.
Benedict Paten is a Professor of Biomolecular Engineering at UC Santa Cruz and associate director of the UCSC Genomics Institute, where he directs the Computational Genomics Lab. He is a PI on genomics efforts including NHGRI AnVIL, the Human Cell Atlas, and the Human Pangenome Reference Consortium.
Jeffrey D. Weekley is Director of Research IT at UC Santa Cruz, leading HPC and research cyberinfrastructure for roughly 1,100 researchers, and brings over 30 years of HPC and networking experience. A PhD student in Computational Media at UCSC, he studies generative AI for neurodiverse STEM learners.
Yi Zhang is a Professor and Director of the Generative AI Center at UC Santa Cruz and co-founder of Rul.ai, named one of Forbes' 50 Most Promising AI Companies. Her research spans information retrieval, natural language processing, AI, and robotics. Honors include the ACM SIGIR Test of Time Award.