PI Dashboard Team
The PI Dashboard team works at Cornell University under the Office of the Vice Provost for Research.
Director
Zachary Jacques is the Director of Information Services for Research Administration Support within Cornell's Office of the Vice Provost for Research, and is responsible for leading the PI Dashboard team. Zach has an educational background in the life sciences and in computer graphics. He brings 15 years of leadership experience in research data management and software engineering to the team.
"We truly view the faculty as customers, and have carefully built the PI Dashboard based upon their direct feedback. Our team is passionate about getting the right information together and presenting it in a clean intuitive way to help our PIs manage their research."
Product Manager
Paul Davis has a background in social sciences research and software development. Paul is an IT industry veteran with over 20 years experience building software for academic clients. His prior credits include work on Oregon Trail, the research leading to the TI Graphing Calculator, and Financial and a Space Management Systems for the Cornell College Of Engineering.
Paul is the voice of the PI Dashboards and you'll see him out and about on the Cornell campus giving demonstrations and meeting with faculty to learn more about how he can fine tune their experience to make it as smooth as possible.
Application Architect and Lead Developer
Brett Haranin is a software developer focused on developing beautiful and functional application experiences paired with fast and secure back-end data services and infrastructure. Brett brings 14 years of software engineering experience to the team.
Brett has designed a state-of-the-art cloud based application architecture for the PI Dashboard that is secure, fast, and scalable.
Software Engineer
Tim Burke is a computer scientist, office comedian, and engineer who spends his days writing the software that powers the PI Dashboard. He has 8 years of development experience, much of that time spent in startups, where he learned a "build it, break it, test it, fail fast and fix it" approach to designing and building software.
Tim extended the testing process for the PI Dashboard, incorporating best practices for automated code quality assessment, test framework speed, and code review using kittens.
User Experience Designer
Andrew Guerriero is an Ithaca-based UX consultant with 15 years of experience in user-centered design, user interface development, and information architecture. He has specific expertise in designing, improving, and building applications for higher education. He has worked extensively with product teams at Cornell and other institutions to create rewarding user experiences for faculty, staff, and students.
Andy has worked closely with the PI Dashboard team and Cornell faculty in an effort to make the dashboard as easy to use as possible.
Associate Developer and QA Engineer
Derek Palmer has an educational background in Digital Cultures and Technologies alongside Media and Communication with a concentration in Applied Information Technology and Computer Science. He has extensive experience in testing and troubleshooting a wide array of hardware and software.
Derek writes the bulk of our automated testing scripts for the PI Dashboard and develops components for the PI Dashboard with Brett.
User Experience Designer
Ellen Hartman is a user experience designer and technical writer focused on keeping the PI Dashboard easy-to-use and useful to faculty. In previous positions at Cornell, she has designed web content for the IT community and for a translational research project on the environmental risk factors for breast cancer. Prior to Cornell, she worked in the software industry on products ranging from word processing to 3D modeling. Helping people work smoothly and successfully has been her passion since she first discovered technical writing as an undergraduate.
Ellen conducts usability testing and develops communication and support content to make sure our PI Dashboard experience is intuitive to users.
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