Welcome to NAISS: Debasmita Samaddar

Debasmita Samaddar (Debbie) has joined NAISS as Director of User Support and Training. Her aim for user support is simple: every user, from a first-year PhD student to a large GPU project, should feel heard.

Every user deserves to be taken seriously and given a clear path to the right support, says Debbie.

That range is one of the main challenges for NAISS, which supports users at many levels of experience and computing needs.

“We support our biggest users, who have years of experience running on multiple CPUs or GPUs,” she continues.  “But a student who has just learned to log on to an HPC cluster  is equally important. We need training that brings that person up to speed, and we need to cater to both groups and everything in between.”

The same principle guides her approach to training. “For me, there’s no stupid question. We can design training for different starting points so people can learn effectively.”

Listening first

In her first month on the job, Debbie is focused on listening. She wants to hear what isn’t working just as much as what is. “Success stories are great for motivation, but we also need to hear the problems to become a better organization,” she says. “I won’t fix everything tomorrow, but I want to show that we are trying.”

Looking further ahead, she wants to reach researchers outside traditional HPC fields, including the digital humanities. “The world is changing rapidly. Reaching new users may mean reshaping our training, and we should be prepared to do that.”

A user herself

Her approach comes from her years as a user, and calls herself a former ‘problem user,’ someone who had a lot of questions.  

“For a large part of my PhD, I relied on application experts I could go to, show my code and say, I’m lost, what do I do?” She says. “Many of them are still my role models. I want to offer that same availability.”

Debasmita is a plasma physicist by training. After growing up in India, she moved to the United States for her higher education. She then held research positions in southern France, the UK and in the United States, always collaborating with partners around the globe. At the UK Atomic Energy Authority she worked on nuclear fusion, supervised PhD students and took on a growing share of training. She then moved to the University of Chicago’s Research Computing Center as a Senior Computational Scientist. There, training and user support became central to her work, and she advised researchers from many fields, including the humanities, on their computing needs.

“It’s amazing how much similarity there is across domains,” she says. “The same underlying fluid equations appear in fields as diverse as ocean science and cardiovascular flow research, even though the models and scales differ.”

What drew her to NAISS was the chance to help shape a growing organisation, building on the expertise already here. “It’s an expanding organisation, with so much freedom to contribute and so much to learn. That challenge is what draws me here.”

A message to users

“Welcome. We hope we can provide what you need to do work that has an impact on our lives, and on life on this planet. We are all small pieces of a bigger puzzle.”

Outside work, Debbie enjoys running, cycling, swimming, photography and spending time with her young family.