STAFF NEWS

The OIT Team


The UC Merced Office of Information Technology team is made up of 69 FTE assigned to 9 distinct functional units.


Maintaining a team atmosphere can be challenging, especially with staff spread between various campus locations and the Downtown Campus Center. Regular meetings, a dedication to top-down transparency and building a culture of leadership, and our implementation of SLACK for team-wide communication has been helpful in maintaining a shared vision of OIT's role on campus and our path going forward. You can read more about OIT's operating philosophy and our strategic planning model here. For more information about our implementation of SLACK, please visit the Workforce Planning section of this report.


We may be biased, but we think the team we've assembled is pretty phenomenal. Read on for news of OIT staff accomplishments and service in 2017.

External Awards

Sarvani Chadalapka


High Performance Computing (HPC) Administrator Sarvani Chadalapka was honored with a number of awards in 2017. Two were travel scholarships: the UCCSC Community Award for Research in IT, a University of California Office of the President scholarship awarded to research IT employees from each UC campus and medical center to support participation in the University of California Computing Services Conference (UCCSC) and the CEE-Broadening Participation Program Travel Scholarship, awarded by the XSEDE Community Engagement and Enrichment (CEE) program, this scholarship supports participation in the Practice & Experience in Advanced Research Computing (PEARC) conference.


Sarvani was also awarded the Internet2 Inclusivity Award, which recognizes talented individuals seeking opportunities to gain hands-on technical experience, and spotlights women in the field of information technology and their efforts to use technology to serve research and education at their individual institution.

Jeffrey Weekley


Director of Cyberinfrastructure and Research Computing Jeffrey Weekley was awarded a prestigious CENIC Innovations in Networking Award for Research for the Wide-Area Visualization Environment (WAVE) system at UC Merced (pictured left). You can read more about the WAVE in our Research Computing section.


Also named in the award were Greg Dawe, Principal Development Engineer for CalIT2 at UCSD; Rachel Hadley, the Senior Administrative Analyst, Design and

Construction at UC Merced; and Dr. Nicola Lercari, an Assistant Professor of World Heritage in the School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts at UC Merced.

Internal Awards & Recognition

Years of Service Awards

More OIT staff were honored at the 2017 Years
of Service awards than from any other unit!

Pictured left to right: OIT's Nick Hansard, Nick Dugan, Shane Middleton, Jose Magana, Edson Gonzales,
April Wheeler, Belay Tekalign, and Yulduz Akhmedzanova along with Vice Provost Gregg Camfield and other UC Merced staff.

Shane Middleton

April Wheeler

Mohammad Zaidi


Joshua Swink



Edson Gonzales

Jose Magana

Nicholas Dugan

Nicholas Hansard

Yulduz Akhmedzanova

Belay Tekalign


Star Awards

for Outstanding Service


Ron Curtis

Ronnie Vasquez

Raj Paneer

Star Awards for UCPath

These awards, bestowed by campus leadership, recognize the following OIT staff for outstanding service on the UCPath implementation project


Jason Belhumeur
Roger Borges
Codi Hutchings
John Kamminga
Raj Paneer
Michael Parrino
Jeff Pedro
Fernando Reynoso
Mohammad Zaid

Service Recognition
Awards


Chuck Aby

Abhi Agarwal

Jodon Bellofatto

Nathan Bremmer

Juan Garcia Martinez

Edson Gonzales

Keith Hughes

John Kamminga

Shane Middleton

Gisele Murillo

Robert Werner

Will Wilcox

Chancellor's Innovation Award


Service Desk's Jenelle Batchelor and Matthew Mitchell took home third place and a $1,000 prize in the 2017 UC Merced Chancellor's Innovation Award competition.


Their winning submission was Rufus Time, the OIT scheduling application that makes it possible for students, faculty and staff to schedule their own appointments for OIT support and service. Rufus Time has been active since June 2016. To date, UC Merced community members have used Rufus Time to schedule IT support 4,901 times!


Learn more about Rufus Time in our video below (note: video won't appear for mobile viewers).

Promotions

BUSINESS SERVICES

Ronnie Vasquez
promoted to

IT Financial Analyst Supervisor

CLOUD INFRASTRUCTURE &
SECURITY SERVICES

Nick Hansard

promoted to

Director of Cloud Services, Infrastructure, and Security Operations

New Hires

NETWORK
& VOIP


Abhimanyu Agarwal

Network Engineer

Giselle Murillo

Network Engineer

ENTERPRISE DATA SERVICES


Julie George

Enterprise Data Services Manager

Dave Stevenson

Application Programmer

CLOUD INFRASTRUCTURE & SECURITY SERVICES


Kevin Cann

Senior Systems Administrator

ACADEMIC & EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES


Ramsin Tamraz

Video Projects Coordinator

SERVICE DESK


Jerry Chavez

Service Desk Support Technician

Eric Rahilly

Service Desk Support Technician

Staff Service


0


0


Marisela Angel

UC Merced Supply Chain

Redesign Planning Committee



Ron Curtis
UCPath & OnBase Operations

Communications Group



Julie George

University of California Business

Intelligence Collaboration Group

(UC Merced rep)



Codi Hutchings

Chancellor’s Advisory Committee

on Queer Issues


UC Merced

Transgender Resources

Committee



0


Kent Carpenter

University of California

Computing Services

Conference Ambassador


Information Technology

Service Management Educause

Consortium Group



Nick Dugan

University of California

IT Security Committee

(UC Merced rep)



Joan Holmquist

University of California

EducationTechnology

Leadership Committee

(UC Merced rep)


University of California

Electronic. Accessibility

Committee

(UC Merced rep)


Board of Directors,

Directors of Educational

Technology/California Higher Education (DET/CHE)



Matt Cato
University of California
Cross-Campus Enrollment

System (CCES)

Change Control Board



Matt Faulkner

University of California

IT Architecture Committee
(UC Merced rep)



Keith Hughes
Chancellor's Advisory

Committee on Sustainability



Melissa Tessier

Secretary, UC Merced

Staff Assembly



Jeffrey Weekley

University of California

Research IT Committee

(UC Merced rep)