Research Services Staff

The Research Services staff provides consultation, training, and tutorials to support computing and research at Boston College.   For more information, contact one of the staff members, or Barry Schaudt (schaudt@bc.edu or 617-552-0242).  The staff consists of the following people:

Samson Alva

Samson is pursuing a Ph.D. at the Department of Economics at Boston College.  He has taught undergraduate courses in Microeconomics, at both the Principles and Intermediate level, and a graduate course in Math for Economists at Boston College.  His main research interests are in microeconomic theory and applied microeconometrics.  He has expertise in Stata and Matlab.

Education:

    M.A. in Economics, Boston College (Chestnut Hill, MA)
    B.A. in Economics, Mercer University (Macon, GA)
    B.S. in Physics and Mathematics, Mercer University (Macon, GA)

Constantin Andronache

Constantin joined Boston College in 2001 as a GIS specialist and research consultant for scientific software and scientific computing. He has extensive experience in GIS management and technical support. He has expertise in Applied Mathematics, numerical methods, data analysis and visualization. He is proficient in Mathematica, Matlab and ArcGIS and provides consultations for faculty and research staff on computing solutions, and GIS.

Research Interests:

• Scientific computing
• Geographic Information Systems
• Data analysis and visualization

Selected Publications

• Phillips, V.T.J., Sherwood, S., Andronache, C., Bansemer, A. Conant, W.C., DeMott, P.J., Flagan, R.C., Heymsfield, A., Jonsson, H., Poellot, M., Rissman, T.A., Seinfeld, J.H., Vanreken, T., Varutbangkul, V. and J.C. Wilson. Anvil glaciation in a deep cumulus updraft over Florida simulated with an Explicit Microphysics Model. I: The impact of various nucleation processes. Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, 131(609), 2019-2046, 2005.
• Andronache, C., Estimates of sulfate aerosol wet scavenging coefficient for locations in the Eastern United States, Atmospheric Environment, 38, 795-804, 2004.
• Andronache, C., Estimated variability of below-cloud aerosol removal by rainfall for observed aerosol size distributions, Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics ,3, 2003
• Andronache, C., L. J. Donner, C. J. Seman, and R. S. Hemler, A study of the impact of ITCZ on aerosols during INDOEX, J. Geophys. Res., 10.1029/2001JD900248 11, 2002.

Education:

    Ph.D. in Atmospheric Sciences, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, USA
    M.S. in Physics, University of Bucharest, Romania.

Keith Chan

Keith Chan is a Ph.D. student at the Graduate School of Social Work. He has worked as a research assistant in understanding the needs of Chinese Americans, older adults, and immigrants in areas of mental health, well-being, spirituality, breast cancer, and coping. Keith is also a Diversity Fellow at Boston College,  a trained therapist, and looks forward to furthering his research for his dissertation in trauma, mental health, and wellness with marginalized populations. Keith is a statistical consultant and has expertise is in SPSS.

Select Publications:

• Tran, T. V., Chan, K., & Nguyen, T. N. (2011). Reliability and validity of a bilingual measure of religiosity in English and Vietnamese. Psychological Reports. In Press.
• Kelley, M., & Chan, K. (2010). The role of attachment to god, meaning-making, and religious coping as mediators in the grief experience. Death Studies, In Press.
• Lee, E. O., & Chan, K. (2009). Religious/spiritual and other adaptive coping strategies among Chinese American older immigrants. Journal of Gerontological Social Work, 52(5), 517-533.

Education: 

    Masters in Social Work, Boston College
    B. A. in English and American Literature, Brown University

Rani Dalgin

Rani has over 25 years experience as a clinician and statistical research consultant in the public, private, and government sectors. Rani has been a consultant at Boston College since 1998 and has customized discipline specific and general statistics courses for faculty and graduate students on a variety of statistical topics including introductions to SPSS, Stata, and SAS, Regression, Survival Analysis, HLM, AMOS, and in conjunction with the O'Neill Library Staff: "Access to Dataset Repositories for Social Science Research."

Rani's current research interest include Gerontology, Measures of Psychological Resiliency in Adolescents and Adults, Quantifying Success Predictors in Hospital Based Social Work Practice, and Quantifying Success Predictors for Homeschooling and Distance Learning in K through 12 students.

Selected Publication:

"Case Management as Management" with Dr. Nancy Veeder, Journal of Social Service Research, St. Louis, MO, January 2005.

Education:

    A.B., M.S.W.,  and M.Ed. in Counseling Psychology, Washington University in St. Louis

Lucrezio Figurelli

Lucrezio is a Ph.D student in Economics. At Boston College, he was a teaching assistant for EC 131 and EC 132 Principles of Microeconomics and Macroeconomics, and for EC 201 Microeconomic Theory. Before coming at Boston College he also worked as an Economist at the Commodities and Trade Division of  the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN. His research interests are in Applied Microeconomics and Industrial Organization. His research is focused mainly on imperfect competition and consumer behavior. He has expertise with Stata and Matlab.

Education:   

    M.A. in Economics, Boston College.
    M.A. in Economics and Quantitative Methods, Roma Tor Vergata.
    B.A. in Political Science. University of Palermo

Matt Gregas

Matt Gregas has twelve years of experience as a biostatisitican.  Upon receiving his doctoral degree at the University of Minnesota, where his research focused on statistical methods for estimating the firing rate of a single neuron, he spent two years as a research fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health.  There he continued his work on statistical analysis of neural data.  In addition we was part of a research team studying the natural history of Alzhiemer's disease.  In 2007 he joined Children's Hospital Boston as a Senior Biostatistician and an Instructor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School.

Dr. Gregas has extensive experience in Biomedical research.  He has served as the project biostatistician on several clinical trials.  The focus of these trials were new interventions for autism spectrum disorders and neo-natal seizures.  He has collaborated with scientists primarily in pediatric neurology.  He has published articles on epilespy, autism, treatment of neonatal seizures, muscular dystrophies, and stroke.  His statistical interests are semiparametric regression and curve-fitting, non-linear regression, and longitudinal data analysis.

Selected Publications

• Peters JM, Sahin M, Vogel-Farley VK, Jeste SS, Nelson CA 3rd, Gregas MC, Prabhu SP, Scherrer B, Warfield SK: (2012) Loss of white matter microstructural integrity is associated with adverse neurological outcome in tuberous sclerosis complex:  Acad Radiol. 2012 Jan 19(1):  17-25.
• Rutkove SB, Shefner JM, Gregas M, Butler H, Caracciolo J, Lin C, Fogerson PM, Mongiovi P, Darras BT (2010):  Characterizing spinal muscular atrophy with electrical impedance myography.Muscle Nerve. 2010 Dec; 42(6):  915-21.
• Krishnan ML, Commowick O, Jeste SS, Weisenfeld N, Hans A, Gregas MC, Sahin M, Warfield SK. (2010): Diffusion features of white matter in tuberous sclerosis with tractograph:  . Pediatr Neurol. 2010 Feb;42(2):101-6.
• O'Leary H, Gregas MC, Limperopoulos C, Zaretskaya I, Bassan H, Soul JS, Di Salvo DN, du Plessis AJ (2009): Elevated cerebral pressure passivity is associated with prematurity-related intracranial hemorrhage:    Pediatrics. 2009 Jul; 124(1):  302-9

Education:

    Ph.D. Statistics.  University of Minnesota
    B.S. Mathematical Sciences.  Michigan Technological University

Ronald Ko

Ron joined Boston College in 2007 as a Data Management Consultant. He assists research groups to develop, optimize, port databases; collect and disseminate data via dynamic Web pages; set up templates; give tutorials/workshops; and assist research groups with grant applications as related to collecting, managing, disseminating data.  Ron is proficient in Perl, Java, C#/C++/C, Python, Oracle, MySQL, PhP, and other various languages.

Before joining Boston College , Ron worked for Verizon Information Systems, National Marine Fishers Service, Lucent Technologies, and Raytheon.

Areas of Interests:

• Web application design and development

• Data collection, analysis and reporting

• Content management

• Networking and communications

Education:

    M.S. in Computer Science, Boston University
    B.S. in Computer Science, University of Massachusetts, Boston, MA

Federico Mantovanelli

Graduate Student Assistant
federico.mantovanelli@bc.edu

Federico is a Ph.D student in Economics. At Boston College, he taught EC132, Principles of Macroeconomics, for two semesters and a summerterm. He was also a teaching assistant for EC132 an EC131, Principles of Microeconomics. His research interests are in Microeconometrics and Development Economics. His research is focused on the economic effects of international migration. He has expertise with Stata.

Education:      

    M.A.  in Economics, Boston College      
    M.Sc. in Economics, Bocconi University (Mila, Italy)      
    B.A. in Economics and Business Administration, Bocconi University (Milan, Italy)

Wei Lucy Qui

Wei has experience as a Scientific Researcher and Scientific Software Engineer in both academic setting and industry. Prior to joining Boston College in 2009, she worked for Meteorological Services of Canada, Mass General Hospital, Hospira Inc and Weather Services International, where she invented scientific algorithms, developed software tools and created real-time embedded applications. 

Wei has expertise in open source and commercial software engineering, cross platform computing, algorithm development, real-time embedded system, data acquisition and information visualization. She is skilled in programming with C/C++, MATLAB, PERL and other languages.

Education: 

    M.S. in Computer Science, University of Western Ontario in Canada.  
    B.S. in Applied Chemistry, Jiangxi Science & Technology Normal University

Research Interests:

• Scientific computing
• Algorithm development
• Software engineering
• Data acquisition and analysis
• Information visualization

Selected Publications:

• Kuo, B., Itzhak, A., Qiu, W., Urma, D., Kwong, K., Mao, J., Rosen, B. Dynamic Imaging of the Brain Activity During Feeding and Epigastria Discomfort/Pain with a Physiological Gastric Stimulus. Gastroenterology, 2005; 128, 4 (Suppl. 2): A-372.
• W. Qiu, R.E. Mercer, J.L. Barron (2001), 3D Storm Tracking in 3D Doppler Precipitation Reflectivity Datasets. Irish Machine Vision and Image Processing conference (IMVIP2001), pp79-86 (best paper award).

Barry Schaudt

Barry Schaudt has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Dartmouth College.  Before arriving at Boston College, he taught Computer Science at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon, and was at the forefront of building the University of Minnesota Supercomputing Institute.  At the University of Minnesota, he led the transition from a small Institute that leased time on supercomputers and purchased research support to an Institute that purchased and managed its own computer systems, and provided user support to a broad range of researchers.   In addition, Barry has a background in Scientific Visualization, and has expertise in C/C++, MySQL, web technologies such as Ruby/Ruby on Rails, Java and Perl, as well as a wide range of software tools.

Areas of Interest:

• Building a group at Boston College to support research
• High Performance Computing
• Desktop computing
• Scientific and data visualization

Education:

    Ph.D. in Computer Science (Computational Geometry), Dartmouth College 
    M.S. in Mathematics, University of Michigan
    B.S. in Mathematics, University of Michigan

Ekin Ustun

Ekin  Ustun is a PhD student in the Department of Economics at Boston College. She worked at the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College as a research assistant. She taught Principles of Microeconomics and Macroeconomics at Boston College. Her research interests are primarily international macroeconomics and macroeconomic policies. 

Education:

    M.A. in Economics, Boston College
    M.A. in Economics, Sabanci University, Istanbul
    B.S. in Economics, Middle East Technical University, Ankara
    B.S. in Mathematics, Middle East Technical University, Ankara

Tao Yang

Tao Yang is a PhD student in economics at Boston College. He has been a teaching assistant for Econometrics Methods. His main research interest is econometric theory and applied econometrics. He has knowledge of Matlab.

Education:      

    M.A. in Economics, Boston College       
    M.S. in Economics, Peking University     
    B.S. in Mathematics,  Jilin University

Wei Zhang

Wei Zhang is a PhD student in economics at Boston College. He has been a teaching fellow for Statistics and Econometrics. Wei also worked as a research assistant in the Center for Retirement Research. His main research interest is Financial Econometrics. He has knowledge of Matlab and Stata.

Education:       

M.A. in Economics, Boston College       
M.S. in Mathematics, Indiana University-Bloomington      
B.S. in Mathematics, University of Science and Technology of China