strategic eResearch leadership

eResearch is an uncommon professional term. It is referred to cyber infrastruture in the USA and increasingly Digital Research Infrastructure in Australia.

Strategic leadership at Monash eResearch Centre

Former Deputy Director: architecting a global innovation hub

Recruited to lead the strategic evolution of the Monash eResearch Centre (MeRC), I provided the vision and executive framework to transform institutional technology into a world-leading engine for discovery. During my tenure, Monash's global research rankings climbed into the top three for growth, while the Centre’s national footprint expanded by $1M annually.

My leadership focused on three key pillars of institutional excellence:

The Operating Model for Scale: I pioneered a unique service model that sustained a 75–85% CAGR in consumption while maintaining flat-lined expenditure. This ISO9001-certified framework transformed the Centre into a trusted custodian of "computing fuel," supporting over 2,000 Chief Investigators and an ecosystem of 100,000 researchers.

Digital & Data Governance: I held direct responsibility for the institution’s cloud and research data lifecycle strategies. By implementing robust governance and fiscal accountability, I ensured that digital infrastructure remained an asset rather than a liability, bridging the gap between high-level policy and technical execution.

Leadership & Culture: Beyond the infrastructure, I focused on human capital—coaching the next generation of digital leaders and fostering a DevOps culture that aligned the University’s technology stack with the fast-moving needs of modern, data-centric research.

This decade of leadership proved that with the right strategic architecture, institutional technology can move from a background service to a primary driver of global competitive advantage.

Pioneering a culture of empowerment

Transforming IT Culture: From Control to Empowerment

Innovation is a byproduct of culture. Research and research infrastructure innately rejects the traditional gatekeeper model of IT in favor of strategic partnerships that empower staff and researchers.

"Research is the journey of the unknown"

By moving away from restrictive behavior control and cost-containment as a primary metric, I fostered environments where technology was a catalyst for creative problem-solving. Key strategic transformations:

Architecting high-trust partnerships: In collaboration with industry leaders like Red Hat, I pioneered the institutional adoption of Ceph (Software-Defined Storage). This wasn't merely a technical upgrade; it was a cultural shift. It moved our teams toward a DevOps mindset, where the people running the infrastructure were empowered to continuously improve data management services in real-time, leading to our recognition as Red Hat’s Storage Client of the Year. The strategy was that vendors were used to attain the lowest price-per-unit storage, whereas our headcount was used to scale in number of bespoke storage presentations ... empowering researchers.

Web-Scale Networking & Institutional Agility: Partnering with Cumulus Networks (now NVIDIA) (and see accelerating Web-Scale adoption), I drove the adoption of web-scale networking principles across the university. By replacing rigid, siloed networking protocols with open, automated workflows, we empowered the broader institution to operate with the speed and flexibility of a modern tech enterprise. Most pertinently, this strategy enabled central IT networking staff to re-invent themselves and pioneer devops within the IT function.

Converging cloud & HPC for research impact: My most significant cultural impact was the "devopsification" of High-Performance Computing. By bridging the gap between the cloud and HPC worlds (presented at Supercomputing 2016) and my team making significant contributions to the book OpenStack for scientific research, my team enabled researchers to utilise OpenStack for scientific research at scale. This removed the technical friction typically found in legacy systems, allowing researchers to focus on science rather than system administration. The key strategy was in recognising the subcultures and industry hype in both sectors, creating a safe place for both side to engage at organisation and global community levels.