Our hardware is exciting but our people are more than that

Aditi is driven by a passion for uniting communities, solving intricate problems, and forging connections between seemingly disparate concepts.

Aditi’s role centres on fostering collaborations that harness supercomputing’s potential and bringing together diverse minds to tackle complex scientific challenges. Aditi loves unravelling puzzles and weaving patterns, while advocating for the transformative power of interdisciplinary innovation.

Ahmed has been involved in the Information Technology industry for 19 years, ranging from various roles such as systems administrator, on-site support, and helpdesk roles. For 12 of those years, he’s been working as Linux Systems Administrator and recently (2024) moved to the Visualisation team as a System’s Engineer.

Ahmed specialises in Administration of Linux and Windows Systems, Virtualisation Management, Applications deployment, Website hosting, Hardware Infrastructure Management, Monitoring, Disaster recovery, as well as Network support.

Alexis’s formal qualifications include a PhD in Environmental Engineering, Masters in Mechanical Engineering (Thermofluids) and Bachelor of Mechanical Engineering (Thermofluids).

He commenced with Pawsey in March 2018 and brings a wealth of knowledge in the application and development of numerical/computational tools for the development of solutions for scientific and applied engineering and fluid mechanics problems.

In his current role he is responsible for engaging new researchers, undertaking collaborative uptake projects to develop or improve performance of computational tools/workflows, and presents training material focused on computational research.

Alexis is a University lecturer, he has received numerous awards and published a number of journal articles.

Ali is a Visualisation Specialist with an engineering background and specialises in visualising scientific data.

With extensive exposure to VTK technology and script visualisation this puts him in good stead to supply researchers with an in-depth insight into their simulation, resulting in an integrated time-efficient workflow. His experience of working on fluid flow in porous media is a significant asset in the support of geoscientists.

Ali provides customised high-end hardware/software packages for different case studies in Geoscience, Petroleum Engineering, CFD, and eHealth. His extensive knowledge in image segmentation and processing of microscopy images (micro-CT, SEM) helps generating large-scale visualisations in high-resolution.

Andrew is a highly experienced IT professional with more than 20 years’ experience in the industry, he has worked in a number of institutions including the University of Glasgow and Edinburgh. He holds a Master of Science in IT Computer Security and a Bachelor of Science (Hons) in Biochemistry.

Andrew commenced with Pawsey in 2017 and is responsible for several Cray XC30/XC40 systems, commodity clusters and high performance Lustre storage systems, maintenance planning and implementation, general user queries, liaison with vendors, bug tracking and upgrade testing.

Between 2013 and 2017 he was the Senior Supercomputing Systems Manager representing Pawsey Supercomputing Centre at The University of WA.

Ashley is a highly experienced System Administrator with more than 18 years’ experience in the Supercomputing industry.

After completing a Bachelor of Engineering (Major Computer System), he spent 10 years as System Administrator/Programmer at The University of WA.

He commenced with Pawsey in 2011 as Supercomputing Systems Administrator and is responsible for configuring and administering the High Performance Facilities including the SGI High Performance Computing GPU Cluster and the HPC Parallel File-system at The University of WA.

Ashley is also a Pawsey representative on The University of WA Technical Operations Group Panel.

Having completed a Bachelor of Podiatric Medicine and a Master of Biomedical Science (Human Biology), Audrey has experience in both clinical and research settings. Her interest lies in the area of bioinformatics, where crossover from bench to bedside is taken place. With her strong background in biology, she joins the Pawsey Team to work on accessibility of HPC for bioinformatics.

Boney holds a degree in Bachelor of Electronics & Communication Engineering and is a Microsoft-certified IT professional.

She commenced with the Pawsey Helpdesk and Technical Services in March 2022 and is responsible for managing incidents and service requests as well as responding to a wide array of queries from Pawsey users, ensuring their needs are addressed in a timely and efficient manner.

Boney has more than 8 years of experience in the Information technology industry as an IT Administrator as well as in technical support, customer service roles, and procurement

Mr Evans brings decades of IT management experience to his current role of seeking to understand the business needs of end users and translating these into specific IT requirements. He coordinates the delivery of IT services, products, environment and support, to enable the required business outcomes for end users.

An important part of the Service Manager role is to articulate and document agreed levels of service delivery with each user group. Mr Evans is then responsible for ensuring that IT services are provided to the agreed standard, including coordination of the required resources and continuous monitoring of service targets.

Casey is a Senior Lecturer in Quantum Computing at the University of Western Australia and a Quantum Supercomputing Researcher at the Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre. He is a respected expert in quantum algorithms and the theory of quantum systems. He has over 15 years experience working in the quantum technologies sector, as both a researcher in the deep tech industry and an academic, pioneering quantum algorithms for both optical and solid state architectures. He has taught extensively in physics, mathematics, and computer science, and has worked in the banking and geosciences industries, developing techniques for various computationally demanding applications.

Chris obtained a PhD in Computational Physics and a Bachelor of Science, Physics and Computer Science both through The University of WA.

Chris joined Pawsey in 2012 and was promoted in 2016 to his current position of Team Lead – Senior Supercomputing Specialist. During his time at Pawsey Chris has played a pivotal role in the coordination of the merit allocation calls, project management of the procurement of the Advanced Technology Cluster, managing the Pawsey Uptake Project calls and was instrumental in the development and running of the GPU training and User Forums.

Chris brings more than 20 years’ experience in IT infrastructure used for higher education and academic research purposes.

Chris is responsible for the Pawsey Data Services Storage Infrastructure, and his experience covers designing, procuring, commissioning and managing storage and server hardware, filesystems, operating systems and hypervisors.

Chris manages a team of Storage and HSM Systems Administrators, who together, maintain, manage and ensure Data Services are provided to Pawsey researchers, who require storage of, and access to their Research Data Collections of National Significance.

Pawsey Research Data Services provide storage and use of research data collections in either a dedicated RDS storage file system, or in the Pawsey General Science Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM) system, both of which are accessible via the Pawsey Data Portal.

With a background in project management, Christianne has managed a variety of consultancy projects and events for clients in both Australia and the UK.

As Pawsey’s Executive Officer, Christianne supports the Pawsey Board and Leadership Team in areas of governance, strategy, operations and reporting.

Cristian is a computer scientist who joined Pawsey in 2020 as Supercomputing Application Specialist to apply his parallel algorithms knowledge and GPU programming skills to solve HPC challenges.

Prior to Pawsey, he worked at the National Research Council of Italy on accelerating scientific and industrial applications using NVIDIA GPUs.

Mr Carey has over 25 years of experience in the IT industry and currently ensures system availability for the supercomputers at the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre; ensuring continuity of access for Pawsey researchers.

These systems include Magnus and Galaxy, Pawsey’s Cray XC40 and XC30 supercomputers, the Centre’s high-performance Lustre filesystems and the high speed Infiniband fabric which connects these systems together.

Darran has been a part of the Pawsey team, and worked on its systems, since the Centre’s inception as iVEC in 2001.

Pawsey website

Mr Schibeci leads the Supercomputing team – the world-class experts providing access to cutting-edge resources. He coordinates recruitment of operational and uptake team members and represents Supercomputing in the Pawsey Management Team.

Mr Schibeci manages new hardware procurement, such as the Advanced Technology Cluster and the Group File System. 

He brings more than 10 years’ experience in high-performance computing and more than 20 years in systems administration, including Lead System Administrator for our first TOP500 supercomputer and first multi-teraflop supercomputer. This work included technically supporting iVEC’s first GPU cluster and being development champion for maali, the open-source build system.

Deva holds a PhD in Software Engineering which he completed through the Lero-the-Irish Software Research Centre, University of Limerick, Ireland.

He is a Supercomputing Application Specialist at the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre. He is responsible for assisting researchers to efficiently parallelise their codes and port them onto the infrastructure operated in the Pawsey centre.

Deva undertakes technical assessment of parallelised applications for performance on supercomputers and assists research groups in scaling their research applications and simulations from hundreds to thousands of processors.

Edric has a background in analytical chemistry and holds a master’s degree in computational physics from the University of Western Australia, where he also undertook a PhD. His research has focused on near-term quantum optimisation algorithms and classical software development for their simulation on HPC systems.

Before joining Pawsey as a Quantum Supercomputing Researcher in 2024, he worked with Pawsey’s Education and Training Team as an Intern Mentor and Intern Mentor Lead, supporting students in Pawsey’s Summer Research Internship Program.

Emily develops and maintains software for molecular simulation, with a specific focus on GPU-accelerated computing and machine learning methods in quantum chemistry. She has extensive experience developing and supporting software for computational chemistry and molecular modeling and has contributed to multiple open-source molecular dynamics projects.
Emily is also an advocate for open-source software in computational science, and the code she has developed for atomic and molecular simulation has seen widespread use by Australian and international researchers. Prior to joining Pawsey, Emily completed her PhD in physics at the University of New South Wales and worked as a research software engineer at the University of Queensland.

Fathima is a learning and development specialist with over 15 years of experience, designing, developing and delivering successful training programs across various industries and sectors.

She has worked across British, American and Australian education systems and has significant experience in adult education. She also has extensive leadership experience in staff development, process and productivity improvements and overall performance management.

Fathima holds a bachelor’s degree in Computing and a Master’s in Business Administration. She is a qualified Trainer and Assessor with a passion to improve the skills of organizations and its people through effective learning and development strategies.

Coming from a communications background, Gerard has 19 years of experience in marketing, journalism, and content creation. His focus is creating modern, engaging content – whether it be through traditional or digital platforms – and using modern storytelling techniques to deliver messages to the right people.

Before Pawsey, Gerard has worked in various industries – from public sector and gaming to tech and lifestyle – in Australia, Singapore and the UK.

Gerard joined Pawsey in July 2025 to create stories that celebrate the incredible work of researchers and the people behind-the-scenes of Australia’s fastest and greenest supercomputer.

Ilkhom obtained his PhD in Theoretical Atomic Physics from Curtin University, Western Australia.

His background is in theoretical ion-atom collision physics where he developed fully quantum-mechanical and semi-classical computational codes to model ion-atom and ion-molecule collisions. He has extensive experience in developing software which utilise OpenMP, MPI, Cuda and OpenACC parallelism.

At Pawsey, Ilkhom assists researchers with parallelising their codes to efficiently utilise supercomputing resources. Another direction he has been working on is porting researchers’ existing CPU-based parallel codes to run in parallel on GPUs.

Jeffrey is a highly experienced Data Infrastructure Specialist. He holds a Masters in Software Engineering and is certified in PMP and IBM AIX.

Prior to joining Pawsey in 2015, he was employed by IBM Spectrum Storage Engineering, where he developed his strong skills base in designing and implementing enterprise storage systems for large scale supercomputing clusters.

Jeffrey is currently designing, implementing and will manage next generation Pawsey software defined, unified storage for research data and nimbus cloud. He is also setting up an in-place analytics platform to provide multiple spark instances on shared hardware for data scientists and data engineers.

Jeremy holds a Bachelor of Science and a Bachelor of Engineering which he completed with Honours.

With more than 22 years’ experience working in IT, he commenced with CSIRO in 2008 before moving to Pawsey in 2012. Jeremy has been involved with systems administration and supporting cloud infrastructure, and since 2014 he has been responsible for running the WA node of the NeCTAR Research Cloud.

Jeremy is now Technical Lead for the Pawsey Nimbus cloud, which commenced operations in 2017.

Jesse is a visualisation specialist with a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and Games Technology from Murdoch University.

He has several years for experience in the visualisation space including at the Curtin Hub for Immersive Visualisation and eResearch (Curtin HIVE).

His specialisations include Virtual and Mixed reality simulations, and visualisation of multi-disciplinary research data on large scale displays.

Jesse Also completed a Pawsey/iVec internship in 2010.

John commenced with the Pawsey Helpdesk in September 2024 and is responsible for managing incidents and service requests, ensuring Pawsey users requests are answered in a timely manner.
He has more than six years of experience working in information technology and holds a Diploma of IT in Networking. Before working for Pawsey, he worked for CSIRO, in the WA IM&T Onsite team.

Karina is a strategic communicator with over 20 years of experience in audience development, marketing, and science communication across government organisations in Australia and abroad. For more than a decade, she has shaped Pawsey’s communications strategy and elevated its national and international profile.
With a background in architecture from Simón Bolívar University in Venezuela and a master’s in integrated communication management, Karina blends creative thinking with technical insight to translate complex supercomputing and quantum research into compelling stories for mainstream audiences.
She has strengthened government relationships, expanded engagement with academia and industry, and grown Pawsey’s digital presence—showcasing the impact of Australia’s researchers and the infrastructure that supports them.

Kevin Buckley took up the role of Supercomputing Systems Administrator at Pawsey in late January 2018, having spent nine-and-a-half years filling university-wide roles, of eResearch Programmer and eScience Consultant, from within the School of Engineering and Computer Science at Victoria University of Wellington, and was the initial deployer of pilots for, the then pan-Australasian, grid-computing infrastructure, as well as being the administrator of its Radio Astronomy group’s NGAS node.

Prior to moving to New Zealand, Kevin had become the University of Lancaster’s High Performance Systems Consultant, having initially done postgraduate work within computational hydrology/hydrogeology on early parallel processing platforms. Along with an MSc from Lancaster, Kevin has a BSc/ARCS from taking a Physics degree at Imperial College.

Ludovic joined Pawsey in January 2025, taking on the role of Training and Education Manager, where he focuses on the design, development, and support for training for Pawsey staff, users, and external clients, and oversees Pawsey’s contribution to outreach programs.

Before joining Pawsey, Ludovic worked at the UK’s national supercomputing centre EPCC, part of the University of Edinburgh, UK, until 2022 as a Teaching Fellow. He was part of the teaching team for both on-campus and online MSc programs in High-Performance Computing and MSc in High-Performance Computing with Data Science.

His background is in computing science: Ludovic completed his PhD exploring the combination of the vertex-centric programming model in graph processing with HPC, and holds two MScs in HPC with Data Science and Pervasive Parallelism.

Luke completed a Bachelor of Science (Environmental Science) with Honours from The University of WA. 

Since commencing with Pawsey in 2008, he has held for variety of positions including working on various NCRIS capabilities such as IMOS and TERN (Auscover).  He was Project Manager for a NeCTAR eResearch Tool project (CATAMI), and currently works as a Data Specialist assisting and advising researchers on the use of Pawsey’s resources.

Luke undertakes various outreach, engagement, support and training activities to drive uptake of services.  He also currently works as the Data Manager for WAMSI (Western Australian Marine Science Institution).

Maciej Cytowski is a computational scientist and expert in high-performance computing and data science. He specialises in designing and implementing computational strategies for complex scientific problems, particularly in fields like computational physics, computational biology, weather, climate, and artificial intelligence. His background is mathematics, and he holds a PhD in computational science.

Maciej has held leadership roles in various institutions, overseeing the development and optimisation of HPC systems and leading large-scale computational projects. He is known for his work in optimising algorithms for supercomputers and has collaborated on numerous research projects that require advanced computational methods.

Currently, he is the Head of Scientific Services at the Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre in Perth, Western Australia. With a strong academic background, Maciej Cytowski is recognised for his contributions to enhancing computational approaches in scientific discovery.

Mark Gray is currently the Head of Scientific Platforms at the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre. He brings a strong research and data management background to his role of building the next generation of supercomputing systems for Australia. This includes procurement, deployment, training, user expectation management – and leadership of the team who administer and operate Pawsey systems.

Mark has a background in earth science and research software engineering with experience at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. Prior to joining Pawsey, Mark worked with the Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network and the Integrated Marine Observing system here in Australia, building large scale satellite data processing facilities.

Mark is a research executive with more than 20 years’ experience working at a senior level in innovative research and business development roles in complex, multi-stakeholder environments. Through national and international programs and joint-ventures, Mark had successfully led initiatives to accelerate the impact of research, development and education programs for Australia’s key energy, mining and agricultural sectors.

He is a former Chief Executive of an LNG research and development alliance of CSIRO, Curtin University and UWA, partnering with Chevron, Woodside and Shell. Prior to his appointment at Pawsey Mark led the innovation and industry engagement portfolio at The University of Western Australia. In addition, Mark is the current Chair of the Board of All Saints’ College and was appointed an adjunct Senior Fellow of the Perth USAsia Centre (an international policy think tank) in 2017.

Basha obtained his PhD in Mechanical Engineering from UTM Malaysia.

Basha has extensive experience in parallel algorithms and numerical methods related to computational Fluid Dynamics, Multiphase flow and Heat transfer. He has worked on several modelling & simulation software, such as COMSOL, SolidWorks, Ansys CFX, FLUENT, ICEM CFD, Hysys, and has published more than 40 journal and conference papers in this research area.

After joining the centre, he has been actively involved in supporting users to install software, scaling and optimization of the codes. He is also involved in revising training materials and developing CFD-CPU and CFD-GPU testing codes.

Previously studying a degree in Computer Systems and Networking at Curtin University, Michael has a diverse background, including data recovery, web hosting, Linux administration, distributed storage, programming, and hosting diverse services for the public.
He joined Pawsey in early 2024 as a Systems Administrator. With over a decade of IT experience, his role at Pawsey Supercomputing is to primarily assist in the development and maintenance of the Acacia Object Storage system.

Mouriyan Rajendran joined Pawsey in 2025 as a Senior Full Stack Developer with over 12 years of experience specializing in the design, development, and architecture of scientific data portals and cloud-native applications.

He holds a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and a master’s degree in business management.

Mouriyan has previously worked with high-performance computing infrastructure, including Pawsey’s Setonix supercomputer, to enable scalable data management and research workflows.

His expertise spans Python, FastAPI, React, Next.js, and PostgreSQL, with strong experience in building distributed and containerized systems.

He has presented his work at international astronomy forums such as ADASS 2024 and IVOA Interop, showcasing advancements in scientific data services and interoperability.

Dr. Pascal Jahan Elahi is a high-performance and quantum computing expert, leading the quantum supercomputing research group at the Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre. Pascal received his PhD in computational astrophysics, after which he held several postdoctoral research positions. During his PhD and academic career, he developed an extensive track record of developing astronomical software for high-performance computing (HPC) systems. Now part of the HPC community, Pascal uses his expertise to help not only astronomers but researchers across various scientific fields scale their workflows to supercomputing systems and accelerate their science. He works closely with the Australian Astronomical community running precursor radio telescopes to the upcoming SKA-Low radio telescope, the world’s largest low-frequency telescope.Pascal’s current focus is at the intersection of Quantum Computing and Supercomputing, looking to integrate these technologies and grow the Quantum Computing community in Australia. His team are assisting the Australian research quantum computing community by providing access to quantum computers, training in the use of HPC systems and are heavily involved in growing this ecosystem by bridging the gap between quantum computing experts and researchers in other scientific domains.
Pascal is a strong advocate for diversifying the HPC community and a passionate STEM educator. He has developed and delivered training material for researchers using HPC, introductory quantum computing for researchers and primary and high school students to get them excited about STEM.

Pratibha specializes in developing computational techniques for computational fluid dynamics simulations. She earned a PhD in Aerospace Engineering from Georgia Tech. She has worked on code development and parallel computing for complex scientific problems that have applications in combustion, fluid dynamics, multi-phase flow, and quantum mechanics at leading institutions, including the Indian Institute of Science, NASA, and Brown University.

Sam Yates joined Pawsey in 2021 as a Senior Supercomputing Applications Specialist after working in HPC roles at the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre and EPFL.

Sam has a background in pure mathematics with a PhD from the University of Adelaide in the field of discrete analytic geometry, but has since focused primarily on the development of high performance scientific software, with projects in potential fields geophysics, teletraffic modelling, computational biology and computational neuroscience.

Sarah obtained a PhD in Medicine from UWA in 2020. She has a background in both laboratory and computational genetics, specifically focussing on disease gene discovery in neuromuscular disorders.

She is now part of the Supercomputing Applications team at Pawsey, working to support bioinformatics users through workflow development and optimisation, training, and advocacy

Sean commenced his career as a researcher in the domain of computational chemistry.

Since joining Pawsey in 2013 he has become an expert in a wide range of programming languages and technologies, particularly in the areas of grid computing and visualisation. Sean also specialises in: Data analysis, programming and visualisation.

Sean’s formal qualifications include a PhD in Computational Chemistry and a Bachelor of Science (Hons) in Physics and he is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow both at Curtin University and the Technical University of Delft.

Shaun joined Pawsey in August 2025 as Chief Operating Officer (COO).

Dr Shusen Liu is a recognized expert in quantum computing with dual PhD degrees from the University of Technology Sydney and Sun Yat-sen University. His postdoctoral work at Tsinghua University set the stage for his role as an architect at the Institute of Quantum Computing at Baidu. There, he led the development of the Quantum Leaf platform, focusing on integrating cloud computing and AI with quantum technologies.
Shusen is proficient in a range of technical skills, including quantum programming, cybersecurity, and DevOps. He also holds a CISSP certification, underscoring his expertise in cybersecurity within complex quantum and AI infrastructures.

With 15 years of project management experience in the mining industry, particularly managing major upgrades to mining railway signalling and control systems, Stacy has already seen almost every problem that can potentially derail a big project.

In her role, Stacy will bring a diverse group of people together to deliver a system that meets both the user and technical requirements.

A key part of Stacy’s planning is managing the change from existing systems to the new systems while minimising any impact on current Pawsey users. This requires staging the installation works and allowing time to migrate users onto new systems, while ensuring the new systems can simultaneously meet the needs of existing users, and emerging future users.

Coming from an engineering background, Stacy is particularly enthusiastic about the scientific developments that are being advanced using Pawsey facilities

Sumitha is a Linux System Administrator with more than 8 years experience in the IT industry.

After completing her Bachelor of Engineering in computer science she worked as a System Administrator. She commenced with Pawsey in 2019 as IT Officer. Sumitha has been involved with systems administration from 2007.

Tom joined Pawsey in 2024 as a full-stack developer. He is a Meta certified front-end developer and AWS certified cloud practitioner. He has a proven track record in developing, testing, deploying, and maintaining websites, web apps, and servers using a wide range of modern technologies and frameworks.
Tom is responsible for developing and maintaining both the new origin and the data portal at Pawsey. These portals are designed to improve the accessibility of Pawsey’s resources for researchers and stakeholders.

Mr Varetto is an accomplished manager and computational scientist.

His focus is on data-intensive high-performance computing, large scale parallel I/O and accelerators. He has held key roles in significant research projects, such as the EU funded ‘Human Brain Project’, has contributed to numerous projects with the European supercomputing infrastructure and has worked in commercial companies and government and academic institutions in the USA, Europe and Australia.

Mr Varetto has been developing GPU-accelerated scientific software since 2006 and is currently working on designing scalable scientific computing solutions on hybrid CPU/GPU systems and implementing large scale real-time data processing and visualisation workflows, while supporting international research projects such as the Square Kilometre Array (SKA).

Victor has a background in chemical engineering and chemistry, having recently completed his PhD in the same field. His research focussed on biofuel stabilization, combining wet lab techniques with computational chemistry. He utilised High-Performance Computing (HPC) to conduct Density Functional Theory (DFT) simulations, which were instrumental in supporting his experimental findings.
Victor also has a high interest in science communication and education, often speaking to students about his research at both secondary and tertiary schools across Australia. He aims to combine his passion for High Performance Computing and education outreach in his role as an Education Specialist at Pawsey

William joined Pawsey in 2016 initially as HPC System Support Officer before commencing in the position of Systems Administrator in 2017. In this role he has successfully developed and positioned a user and project management reporting web application – Origin.

He works on technologies including: Cray CLE, xCAT, Bright Cluster Manager, LDAP, Slurm, Puppet, Ansible, Linux, Lustre, CommVault, Infiniband, Perl, Python, Django, Flask, C, C++, AngularJS, NodeJS, JavaScript, Git, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Apache, Nginx, Atlassian Tools (JIRA, Confluence)

He holds a Bachelor of Science majoring in Computer Science which be completed through Murdoch University.

Prior to joining Pawsey, William was a Programmer at iiNet.

Leading the visualisation at Pawsey Supercomputing Centre. His duties include helping researchers to develop workflows to visualise large scientific data using the Pawsey remote visualisation infrastructure, training researchers on various visualisation related topics, and design, implement and maintain various visualisation systems and services at Pawsey.

PhD in Geophysics from UWA, specialising in visualisation, human-data interactions and human-machine interactions.