DSRI Leadership

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Michael Kirby, Director

Michael Kirby is a Professor in the Department of Mathematics with a joint appointment in the Department of Computer Science as well as affiliate faculty member status in the Program in Cell and Molecular Biology. His interests include low dimensional and geometric modeling, optimization and the mathematical foundations of Machine Learning. He investigates applications of this work to modeling biological data sets including to health data time series, and omics-data in the setting of infectious disease. He authored the textbook Geometric Data Analysis and, with Chris Peterson, founded the Pattern Analysis Laboratory (PAL). He was an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the Institute for Information Verarbeitung at the University of Tuebingen, Germany. He also was awarded an IBM Faculty Fellowship, and the College of Natural Sciences Award for Graduate Education. He received his S.B. degree in Mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and PhD from the Division of Applied Mathematics, Brown University.

Chandra V. Chandrasekar

V. Chandrasekar (Chandra), Senior Advisor and Liaison to OVPR

V. Chandrasekar (Chandra)is the Research Director of the National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center for Collaborative Adaptive Sensing of the Atmosphere. His research CSU includes large scale modeling and observation of the Atmospheric environment. He is a University Distinguished Professor. He is an elected fellow of, IEEE, the American Meteorological Society, URSI and the National Academy of Inventors. He was Knighted by the Govt of Finland in 2016 at the Finish Embassy in Washington DC.

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Mayla Boguslav, Scientific Liaison

Mayla is a postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Kirby’s lab interested in both working with and studying DSRI. She earned two bachelor’s degrees in mathematics (Columbia University) and philosophy (The Jewish Theological Seminary), and just received her doctorate from University of Colorado – Anschutz in computational bioscience. Her dissertation, titled Revealing and Exploring the Literature’s Known Unknowns: Ignorance and How it Drives Science, created a database of research questions from scientific literature to accelerate the research process. She will continue this work with DSRI of improving the process of creating interdisciplinary research teams. 

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Brandon Shanks, Events, PR, and Communications Coordinator

Brandon Shanks works as the point of contact for events, PR, and communications for the DSRI. He earned his master’s in communication studies at CSU in Aug. 2022, where he researched ethics and environmental communication through the lens of message interpretation. His thesis created an understanding of how listening scholarship, an under-researched field, has discussed listening theorization in a specific community of practice. Pulling from experience in communication, teaching at CSU, and listening research he aims to help grow the DSRI and succeed in its mission of research and collaboration. In his spare time, you can find Brandon rock climbing in the Poudre Canyon and Rocky Mountain National Park.

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Bill Carpenter, HPC System Administrator 

Bill Carpenter spent eight years studying memory in a cognitive neuroscience lab at the University of Colorado Boulder before joining the DSRI. His specialties included maintaining lab hardware and software, experiment programming, and time frequency analytics. While at CU Boulder, Bill contributed to multiple research projects ranging from novel mobile EEG studies to experiments with human perception and object recognition. At the DSRI Bill will oversee the day-to-day operation, maintenance, security, and administration of the high performance computing cluster. Outside of work Bill is a Linux enthusiast who enjoys practicing yoga and playing the upright bass.