Information Session: Cyberinfrastructure Professional (CIP) Fellows Program

CyberInfrastructure Professional (CIP) Fellows Program CyberTraining: Training and Developing a Research Computing and Data (RCD) CI Professionals Community
A joint program between UC San Diego, San Diego State University and Cal State University, San Bernardino partners to develop a CIP workforce.

INFORMATION SESSION
Thursday, January 11, 2024 at 2:00pm – 3:00pm 
A webinar via Zoom 
Learn more about how you  can become a CIP Fellow.

Program Overview 
A critical role within scientific research teams is the cyberinfrastructure (CI) professional who has interdisciplinary skills that bridge the science, engineering, and computing specialties. Readily finding such personnel, with the necessary experience needed to navigate CI ecosytems has become a bottleneck for many projects. The Cyberinfrastructure Professional (CIP) Fellows Program is designed to address this need by training and mentoring a team of interdisciplinary Researcher-Facing (CI Professionals with individualized training programs in advanced computing and workforce development topics, embedding them into institutional departments, teaching them how to support and facilitate research projects, fostering a long-term CIP community, and defining sustainable career paths specifically for these kinds of professionals.

Eligible candidates include those who have domain science and/or computing backgrounds and want to advance their skills in CI, HPC, data science, and have an interest in facilitating scientific research teams who need to use CI resources and services. Potential candidates include CI research support staff, software engineers, system administrators, data curators, computational research scientists and engineers, and CI facilitators (people who work directly with researchers to help them to make effective use of Cyberinfrastructure (CI). The creation of these new CIP-Fellow positions supports the goal of creating long-term career development paths and opening doors to new opportunities for CI Professionals. 

The CIP-Fellows program is seeking candidates who have the appropriate science and/or computing background and the motivation to work with research teams.

How It Works 
Our training approach demonstrates a pedagogical method that is part and parcel of how to develop this unique type of CIP workforce. Namely, it is the combination of individual training, being embedded into projects, coupled with ongoing mentoring, that will most effectively develop personnel with the array of needed skills. Once a Fellow is selected, we will design a customized training program with the goal that they can acquire the combination of technical competencies and soft skills needed to work independently with research teams and to facilitate team research.

This program is a 3-campus partnership lead by the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) between UC San Diego, San Diego State University, and CSU San Bernardino. Our flexible, customized training program allows us to support CIP-Fellow trainees for over 12-18 months before transitioning into long-term positions at their home institutions. Potential candidates will work with their local CIP-Fellows site leads to determine eligibility and funding.  Based on available funding, each institution will host multiple positions locally at typically 25-50%. Candidates will receive funding while working through the CIP program. CIP-Fellows will work in established departments at their home institutions, where they will be able to apply their new knowledge to real world situations.