Research Services provides consultation, training, and tutorials to support computing and research at Boston College. The Research Services staff has expertise in statistics, statistical software, qualitative research, surveys, GIS, scientific computation, data analysis, computational mathematics, and visualization. We also provide assistance with coding, databases, web technologies, and administration and consultation for research oriented computing hardware based within the departments and institutes.
The Research Services staff provides consultation, training, and tutorials to support computing and research at Boston College.
Matt Gregas
Research Services Director
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
Rani Dalgin
Manager Data Consultation and Acquisition
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
Melissa McTernan
Manager Research Statistics
Melissa McTernan holds a Ph.D. in Quantitative Psychology from the University of California, Davis. Prior to joining Boston College, she was an Assistant Professor at California State University in Sacramento. Melissa's primary research interests are in the area of applied statistics for the social and behavioral sciences. Some areas in which Melissa has expertise are methods for zero-inflated and longitudinal data, and random-effect models. She has experience with R, SAS, SPSS, Mplus, as well as Markdown and LaTeX.
Education:
- B.S. in Psychology, University of Mary Washington
- Ph.D. in Quantitative Psychology, University of California, Davis
Yixin Pan
Data Scientist
Yixin has a Master's degree in Data Science from University of Rochester. Prior to joining Boston College, she has working experience of Statistics and Data Science in biostatistics industry. Yixin has strong interested and background in the areas of Machine Learning, Statistical Analysis and Data Science. She has knowledge of Python, R, SAS, SQL and Tableau.
Education:
- M.A in Data Science, University of Rochester
- M.S in Chemical Engineering, University of Rochester
- B.A in Chemistry, Tianjin University
Aastha Malhorta
Graduate Assistant
Aastha is a Ph.D. candidate in Economics and holds a Master's in Applied Economics from the Woods College of Advancing Studies at Boston College. Aastha’s primary research interests are in the fields of Industrial Organization, Energy and Environmental Economics and Applied Econometrics. Her doctoral research focuses on subsidies for renewable energy technologies. She is proficient in R, Stata, Python, Matlab, QGIS, and LaTeX.
Education:
- Ph.D. Economics, Boston College
- M.Sc. Applied Economics, WCAS, Boston College
- M.A. Economics, Delhi School of Economics
Wei Lucy Qiu
Senior Scientific Computational Consultant
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, and real-time embedded system. 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
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).
David Soble
Senior Research Administrator
David has over 25 years of experience as a systems administrator. He started using Linux in the mid-90s while seeking a more performant and customizable platform to the opaque Windows OS.
Prior to joining Boston College, David worked for Amadeus, a global travel company, and for 5 years worked near Munich, Germany in the largest non-military data center in Europe. He also worked for several years as a systems engineer at MIT.
In January 2004, the now defunct SysAdmin Magazine published his article entitled "Rejecting Forged Email with Enhanced DNS" which was a precursor to several spam mitigation techniques and RFC standards. An archived version of the article can be found here: https://drdobbs.com/rejecting-forged-email-with-enhanced-dns/199101720
Deyin Jia
Graduate Assistant
Deyin is a Ph.D. candidate in Economics and has a master's degree in Quantitative Economics from Renmin University of China in 2018. Deyin’s research interests are applied micro and applied econometrics, with a concentration on economics of education. She is experienced in conducting advanced econometric analyses and statistical modeling, with a deep understanding of tools such as Stata, R, Python, and MATLAB.
Education:
- Ph.D. candidate in Economics, Boston College
- M.A. in Quantitative Economics, Renmin University of China
- B.A. in Economics (major), B.Sc. in Mathematics (minor), Renmin University of China
Eliot Heinrich
Graduate Assistant
Eliot is a Ph.D. candidate in physics; he graduated from the University of Vermont in 2020 with bachelors degrees in physics, computer science and mathematics from the University of Vermont. He is interested in quantum information, in particular the effect of the interplay of measurement and unitary evolution on quantum entanglement. Previously, he interned at MIT Lincoln Labs where he learned about simulation techniques for quantum systems. Additionally, he is experienced in Linux shell environments, Python, C++, Rust, and Mathematica.
Education:
- Ph.D. Candidate in Physics, Boston College
- B.S. Physics, Computer Science, Mathematica, University of Vermont 2020
Eric Williamson
Graduate Assistant
Eric Williamson comes to Research Services as a Ph.D. Candidate in Measurement, Evaluation, Statistics, and Assessment (MESA) at Boston College’s Lynch School of Education and Human Development. Prior to enrolling at BC and joining Research Services, Eric taught Algebra at Match Charter High School in Boston. Eric’s research interests include early literacy (PK-3), program evaluation, and preparation of evaluation professionals. Eric has experience with R, Python, Stata, SPSS, Atlas.ti, NVivo, and MaxQDA.
Education:
- B.A. in Multimedia Studies, Loyola University Chicago
Frank Pari
Manager Research Computing
Shortly after high school Frank was sponsored by EMC² for an accelerated Electronics program at NEIT before going on to study Computer Science and Psychology at URI. With over 20 years working as an IT professional, the majority of which working in full stack Linux environments, Frank was first introduced to HPC clustered environments while working as a SysAdmin at Brown University in 2011.
Frank has experience in web hosting and development, systems engineering, network management, scripting (Bash, Perl, Python), data storage and permissions management, parallel file system management (GPFS, Isilon, WekaFS), VMware/ESXi host management, containerization (Docker, Singularity) and host deployment/configuration automation (Debian Installer, Kickstart, Salt Stack, Ansible). As well as extensive experience with HPC specific technologies such as Grid Engine, Slurm and Bright CM
Joe DiLascio
Research Systems Administrator
Joe joined BC in 2022, bringing over 20 years of experience at the intersection of technology and education in both secondary and higher ed environments. His experience includes user support, client and server system administration, software development, network administration, and departmental management. Joe’s academic background encompasses physics, philosophy, and neuroscience including research in HPC environments and instruction of high school and undergraduate students.
Linqi Zhang
Graduate Assistant
Linqi Zhang is a Ph.D. candidate in Economics at Boston College. Her research interests are in Empirical Industrial Organization and Applied Econometrics. Her work focuses on the identification of structural models and their applications to policy questions, with a particular focus on demand analysis. Linqi holds a Bachelor of Engineering in Gemology and Material Technology from China University of Geosciences, a double degree in Bachelor of Economics from Peking University, and a Master of Arts in Economics from Duke University. She has experience with Stata, MATLAB, and R.
Education:
- Bachelor of Engineering in Gemology and Material Technology, China University of Geosciences (Beijing)
- Bachelor of Economics, Peking University
- Master of Arts in Economics, Duke University
- Ph.D. in Economics, Boston College
Manjiri Sahasrabudhe
Research Statistician
Manjiri has a Master’s degree in Public Health from Boston University. Prior to joining Boston College, she was working as a researcher at the University of California, San Francisco. Manjiri has interest and a strong background in areas of Epidemiology and Statistical Analysis. She has experience with R, SAS, and REDCap.
Education:
- B.S. in Human Biology, University of California, Santa Cruz
- MPH in Epidemiology and Biostatistics; Global Health Monitoring and Evaluation, Boston University
Zonggui Li
Graduate Assistant
Zonggui is a Ph.D. student in Quantitative Psychology at Boston College and received a master's degree in Quantitative Methodology, Measurement, and Evaluation from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2018. Her research interests mainly concentrate on multilevel modeling, structural equation modeling, and latent class/latent transition analysis, especially the applications in longitudinal studies. She is experienced in data simulation and analytic programming using mostly R. Other software includes SAS, Python, Mplus, and SPSS.
Viktoriya Babicheva
Research Data Consultant & Acquisition Analyst
Viktoriya holds a Master of Public Health (MPH) degree in Community Health and has extensive experience in both clinical and research settings. With eight years of clinical experience, she has worked with healthcare teams to optimize operations and improve patient care through research data analysis, systems thinking, and process optimization.
Since joining Boston College in 2022 as a Research Implementation Specialist at the Connell School of Nursing, she has contributed to impactful epidemiological studies on Tuberculosis and HIV in Africa, diabetes in Haitian-Americans, and worked with datasets for the international I-CARE4OLD project. Her clinical background, including experiences as a Medical Scribe at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and a Medical Assistant in a private dermatology clinic, complement her expertise in data management and research, helping her navigate the complexities of data types, participant pools, and experimental design.
Viktoriya is a lead administrator for research platforms such as REDCap (including advanced logic, HTML, and SQL design) and Qualtrics, offering consultation on survey design, data quality considerations, and human subject research considerations and best practices. She is skilled in statistical software including SAS, STATA, and R, qualitative analysis software such as NVivo, and is experienced in data visualization tools like Tableau and ArcGIS.
Education:
- Certificate in Applied Biostatistics: Methods and Application. Harvard UniversityMasters in Public Health. Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health SciencesB.S. in Pre-Medical and Health Sciences. Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences
Selected Publications:
- Gregory, K.E., Babicheva, V., Chen, E., McTernan, M., Alberti, T.L., Waddell, A., Meedzan, N. and Warshawsky, N., 2025. The Influence of Burnout, Resilience, and Resources to Support Clinical Practice Among Newly Licensed Nurses Intended Job Plans. JONA: The Journal of Nursing Administration, 55(1), pp.22-31.
- Lee, C.S., Chu, S.H., Dunne, J., Spintzyk, E., Locatelli, G., Babicheva, V., Lam, L., Julio, K., Chen, S. and Jurgens, C.Y., 2024. Body listening in the link between symptoms and self-care management in cardiovascular disease: A cross-sectional correlational descriptive study. International Journal of Nursing Studies, 156, p.104809.