CC* Team: CAREERS: Cyberteam to Advance Research and Education in Eastern Regional Schools

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Given the pivotal role of data and cyberinfrastructure (CI) in scientific discovery and teaching, it is essential that all small and mid-sized institutions be empowered to fully exploit them. Access to physical infrastructure is certainly required, but researchers also need access to “Research Computing Facilitators” (RCFs) possessing the mix of technical knowledge and interpersonal skills required to help them use CI resources effectively. This poses challenges for smaller institutions, since RCFs are in short supply and are difficult to recruit and retain. Moreover, institutions can often afford only one or two, making it challenging to support diverse scientific disciplines. This project is developing a sustainable distributed approach to address these challenges in six Eastern states, facilitated by the Eastern Regional Network, a nascent, but growing collaboration among this project’s seven anchor institutions, other institutions in the Eastern US, and the area’s regional network providers. The project strategy has two principal legs: (1) expanding the RCF talent pipeline by engaging students at smaller institutions in nearly 70 project-based mentored experiential learning opportunities; and (2) developing a regional RCF pool providing CI facilitation across institutional and geographic boundaries. Success of this project directly enhances scientific research at smaller institutions. The regional RCF pool enables researchers to access appropriate expertise without the costs and delays of building an institutional RCF team. The experiential training approach exposes a relatively large, diverse group of students to the RCF profession, yielding opportunities to encourage trainees, especially in underrepresented groups, to pursue RCF careers.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.