I'm retiring!

After 19 years at UC Santa Cruz I retired on December 15, 2023. The reason is entirely personal. I found my time at UC Santa Cruz extremely fulfilling, and I really enjoyed working with all of you!

I’m aware that this announcement comes rather sudden. In fact, I planned this step for a while. However as a soft money guy I won’t get funding for my group if I announce my retirement too early. So it’s a caught-a-tiger-by-the-tail kind of situation. I hope for your understanding.

I’m really happy about CROSS and the OSPO being able to continue in very capable hands: Stephanie Lieggi will continue as executive director and James Davis is succeeding me as faculty director — both are very familiar with the structure, vision, and finances of CROSS and the OSPO (James Davis has been serving on the CROSS Advisory Committee for a number of years). Also part of the leadership team will be Emily Lovell.

James fully supports the vision of the OSPO UC Santa Cruz and our effort to expand across multiple UC campuses with the “UC Network of OSPOs”. Stephanie is leading that amazing six-campus-spanning effort, including UC Berkeley, UC Davis, UCLA, UCSB, UCSC, and UCSD. We are also seeing progress towards getting the OSPO UC Santa Cruz established as part of the Office of Research and work on having Stephanie lead it.

The new PIs and co-PIs for my ongoing grants are: Cormac Flanagan and Stephanie Lieggi for REPETO, Heiner Litz for IRIS-HEP, and Andrew Quinn for the LLNL subcontract with Todd Gamblin.

Foremost I thank my graduated Ph.D. students Sasha Ames (2011), Joe Buck (2014), Dimitris Skourtis (2014), Adam Crume (2015), Andrew Shewmaker (2016), Lucho Ionkov (2018), Michael Sevilla (2018), Noah Watkins (2018), Ivo Jimenez (2019), and Jianshen Liu (2023). Their passionate curiosity, never-ending sense of wonder, and hard work were the real reason why anything got accomplished.

I want to apologize to my current Ph.D. students for forcing them to pick a new advisor in the middle of their UC Santa Cruz careers. But I’m very happy that they all found great new advisors: Esmaeil Mirvakili is now working with Chen Qian, Farid Zakaria with Andrew Quinn, and Jayjeet Chakraborty with Heiner Litz.

I thank Sage Weil for creating Ceph, for the initial spark of an idea and incredible generosity without which CROSS would not exist, for lending his amazing track record and credibility to CROSS that was essential for recruiting our first industry members, and for sharing his technical expertise in many CROSS research and incubator project reviews. I thank Karen Sandler for writing part of the CROSS membership agreement and, together with Nissa Strottman, sharing their invaluable legal expertise and experience. I thank Doug Cutting for his great guest lectures, sharing his technical expertise, and explaining the Apache Software Foundation to us. I thank Nithya Ruff for championing CROSS at all the important places, and for connecting us to OSPO++, a fantastic community that is helping us establish an OSPO at UC Santa Cruz and other UC campuses.

I thank Lavinia Preston, Cynthia McCarley, and Genine Scelfo as well as so many more fantastic individuals in the leadership and staff on all levels of the UC Santa Cruz campus for making everything work and for their skillful navigation of the UC Santa Cruz bureaucracy.

Finally but not least, I thank Scott Brandt for his invaluable support and mentorship without which my career at UC Santa Cruz would not have been possible. It all started when he suggested to me in early 2004, during my leave from industry, to check out the storage systems research group meetings at UC Santa Cruz.

Thank you all!