The Science Gateways Community Institute (SGCI) recently awarded LAVA graduate student Jared McLean the SGCI Young Professional of the Year award at the recent Gateways 2019 conference in San Diego.
McLean who is pursing a Masterʻs in Computer Science, was nominated for his work on the ‘Ike Wai Hawaiʻi Groundwater Recharge Tool, a user-friendly application designed to provide information on O‘ahuʻs groundwater-recharge rates based on a set of land-cover and rainfall scenarios.
The scenarios are represented with two visualizations that aid in data-driven decision making. In addition to his award, McLean presented his paper on the tool at the conference and met with a mentor, Drew LaMar co-founder of the free and open-source software QUBES.
McLean, a Hilo resident, spoke humbly about being recognized and highlighted his experience meeting with his mentor and other conference participants to learn more about their work.
“It’s a great conference to attend because it’s small and intimate”, said McLean. “Itʻs pretty domain specific…itʻs good for finding tools for gateway research.”
The most inspiring moment at this yearʻs conference according to McLean, was the hands-on tutorial titled ʻPortable, Reproducible High Performance Computing in the Cloudʻ, presented by UH cyberinfrastructure research scientist Sean Cleveland and a team from the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC). McLean who described the tutorial as helpful and informative said it expanded his knowledge and will allow him to apply what he learned to his current project.
“Working with Jared has been a great experience”, said Cleveland who worked with McLean on developing the groundwater recharge tool. “He is an excellent developer and great at looking at the requirements for a project and translating them into concrete results that deliver excellent data visualizations and functionality. The work he has done for the ʻIke Wai project has been recognized by others in the community as worthwhile and we could not be happier with the actual results and interface for our stakeholders.”
In addition to working on the multidisciplinary ‘Ike Wai project, McLean is also a fellow with the Hawai‘i Data Science Institute where he will be working on creating a rainfall visualization that reflects changes over time.