The VeRSI Team

Dr Ann Borda, Executive Director

Dr Ann Borda is committed to the advancement of eResearch and transformational capability in partnership with the VeRSI Consortium, and in the wider strategic positioning of eResearch across not only Victorian, but National and International research communities.

Ann holds academic qualifications in informatics and has held senior roles within academic, research and public sector organisations in the UK and Canada, with substantial experience in overseeing and delivering large-scale initiatives to support innovation and access in research and education. 

Anna Shadbolt - eResearch Training and Education Project Officer

Anna is working with the VeRSI team to develop a plan to support a coordinated eResearch training program for partners and other stakeholders in Victoria. This will include a number of targeted workshops and the mapping of existing eResearch training programs and resources, as well as documenting unmet training needs and requirements of research communities where possible.

Chris Myers - Program Director

His duties include delivery of a collaborative communication environment that allows researchers to remotely interact with the Protein Crystallography 1 beamline (PX1) and Powder Diffraction beamline (PD) at the Australian Synchrotron. He is managing the construction of a remote VBL environment at La Trobe University as well as an integrated instrumentation environment for materials and surface scientists.

Dr Craig Bellamy - eResearch Analyst (Digital Humanities)

Craig is an eResearch Analyst within the digital humanities domain. His responsibilities include liaison with VeRSI stakeholders and the 
broader humanities research community, exploring projects and
opportunities that aim to advance humanities
research through the use of advanced computing methods.

Craig has a background in history and has most recently worked for King's College London, where he worked on various Digital Humanities projects.

Conal Tuohy - eResearch Analyst

Con is an eResearch Analyst, focusing on the digital humanities domain and optimising software architecture for reuse. 

Conal has a background as a software developer, particularly using Java, SQL, Topic Maps, XML and XSLT. He has a particular interest in text encoding with TEI , and served for 2 years on the Technical Council of the Text Encoding Initiative Consortium.

Cyrus Keong - Software Engineer

Cyrus’ research interests includes information security, access control, authorization, digital repositories and digital forensics.
Prior to joining VeRSI, Cyrus was involved in several research projects, which focused on the management of research outputs by implementing various digital repositories, building collaborative research platforms and applying security standards to ensure the protection of information and systems.

Elizabeth Tatham - Communications Officer

Elizabeth writes and edits material for VeRSI’s publications, including the annual report and electronic newsletter, and works with project teams to produce posters for conferences. She also helps to maintain VeRSI’s website. 

Gary Ruben - Software Engineer

Gary is a Software Engineer involved in VeRSI's cloud computing and research collaboration projects. After studying engineering he spent a decade as a real-time embedded systems developer in the security and telecommunications industries. Subsequently and prior to joining VeRSI he obtained a PhD in physics, specialising in optics and condensed matter theory, and spent a year as a postdoc. During this time he extensively used and taught Python for implementing computer models, in data analysis and visualization.

Greg Long - Software Engineer

Greg is a Software Engineer primarily involved in VeRSI's cloud computing projects. He has skills across a broad range of problem domains and technologies, but has a particular interest in formal verification, functional and logic programming, Java, and Ruby.
Prior to joining VeRSI, Greg worked with safety critical systems in the fields of medicine and rail.

Jared Winton - Solutions Architect

Jared’s role involves technical analysis and software project management for the life science projects. Jared started at VeRSI as a software developer and took on the role of lead developer in a number of the capability projects before becoming Life Sciences Coordinator.

Joanna Huang - Software Engineer

Joanna is a Software Engineer, based at VeRSI in Melbourne, Australia. She has skills in large-scale distributed applications, cryptographic algorithms, monitoring infrastructure, visualisation of data models and web technologies. Joanna previously worked between CERN (the world's largest physics laboratory, in Geneva), and ASGC (Taiwan's chief Grid Computing centre) on the monitoring and operational applications for distributed Information Systems powering the Enabling Grids for E-sciencE Grid (EGEE) and the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG) projects for more than 5 years.

King Chiu - Software Engineer

Prior to joining VeRSI, King was a software developer at CSIRO High Performance Scientific Computing.

Kieran Spear - Software Developer

Kieran is a Software Engineer, working primarily on the deployment of data management systems at Australian research institutions and universities, using software from the open-source MyTardis project.

Before joining VeRSI, Kieran worked for Canon's Australian research and development arm, CiSRA, developing the embedded systems software that powers Canon products. He also has experience in systems administration and electronics.

Lesley-Anne Sleep - Senior Resources Manager

Lesley-Anne is responsible for the development, management, planning and budgetary control of the financial, infrastructure and human resources of VeRSI, in collaboration with the Executive Director.Lesley-Anne is a CPA with 30 years of leadership experience in finance, strategic planning, and systems design.  As a CFO her past roles included executive responsibility for finance and budgetary control, HR, information systems and property management across multiple sites.

Martin Paulo - Senior Software Engineer

Martin is a software developer: and as such wears multiple hats. First and foremost a programmer, Martin also writes specifications, tests, documents, scripts, configures software and performs the occasional code review. He is very interested in the human side of software development. Going forward, he plans to further his knowledge of cloud computing. Martin has had a long and varied career as a software developer. Way back when, he started out writing assembler, directing embedded systems. From there, via grid programming, he made the move to more conventional development.  Immediately prior to joining VeRSI Martin was active as a Java developer in the financial services arena.

Michael D'Silva - Program Manager and Software Systems Engineer

Michael’s key responsibilities include software project management and the design and development of eResearch software, particularly in the collaborative cyber infrastructure for instrumentation domain.

Prior to joining VeRSI Michael was involved in creating a Web Service Management System that involved integrating loosely coupled management information systems in business environments by investigating the implementation of SOA via SOAP Web Services in the Engineering Domain.

Mika Tsoi - Documentation and Training Officer

Mika’s role is to complement and support communications and outreach activities through expertise in design and layout. He contributes to the production of VeRSI communication outputs, such as videos, eNewsletter, and website.

Mika has skills as a software engineer as well as in user documentation. 

Monique Sleep - Publications and Admin Support

Monique's role within VeRSI involves providing administrative support to staff. She also works with keeping the VeRSI documention and the VeRSI website up to date.

Nuwan Goonasekera - Software Engineer

Nuwan is a Software Engineer at VeRSI. His research interests include software fault isolation, software design and collaborative software. He is currently a PhD candidate at the Queensland University of Technology, researching into methods of software component isolation.  In the past, he worked as a Senior Software Engineer at Industrial & Financial Systems, developing enterprise applications. 

Dr Richard Rothwell - Senior Software Engineer

Richard is tasked with introducing commercial grade software development practices to the VeRSI team. His principle activities include web application development using Java and php. 

Previously Richard was engaged as a Java developer in the financial services sector using the Agile (XTreme programming) process.

Ryan Lindsay - eInfrastructure Architect

Ryan is responsible for the maintenance and development of the VeRSI SRB (storage resource broker) federated storage system and the ongoing delivery of a service oriented architecture (SOA) to researchers and clients. This includes building new infrastructure and systems to support the VeRSI eResearch business plan.

Shaun O'Keefe - Senior Software Engineer

Shaun is a software engineer working mainly on the myTardis project. He works in Python where possible and has extensive experience with Django and search technologies. He has previously worked as an embedded software developer, with a focus on image processing and image security.

Steve Bennett - eResearch Analyst

Steve is an eResearch Analyst, working primarily on research data management systems for microscopy, protein crystallography and biomedical imaging, especially with the Tardis platform.

His background includes software engineering, technical writing and business analysis. He was part of the ARCHER and ANDS teams, and has a strong interest in open source/open content communities such as Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap.