The Focal Point is organized as a collaborative effort between professors and graduate students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The goal of the program is to bring together researchers across a variety of disciplines.

Diana Byrne
Graduate Student Organizer
ORCID: 0000-0002-5793-6024

Diana is a third-year graduate student studying Civil and Environmental Engineering. Her research is focused on using quantitative sustainable design methods to improve the sustainability of water management systems. She first learned to program in an introductory engineering class at Saint Louis University but really started to develop the skills as a graduate student here at UIUC when it was essential for research. Diana is looking forward to showing others how they can apply programming skills to ask interesting questions for their own research projects.

Heidi Imker
Faculty Organizer
ORCID: 0000-0003-4748-7453
Heidi is the Director of the Research Data Service (RDS) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The RDS is a newly formed campus-wide service headquartered in the University Library that provides the Illinois research community with the expertise, tools, and infrastructure necessary to manage and steward research data. Prior to joining the Library, Heidi was the Executive Director of the Enzyme Function Initiative, a large-scale collaborative center involving nine universities, funded by the National Institutes of Health, and located in the Institute for Genomic Biology. Heidi holds a Ph.D. in Biochemistry from the University of Illinois, and did her postdoctoral research at the Harvard Medical School.

Halie Rando
Graduate  Student Organizer
ORCID: 0000-0001-7688-1770
Halie is a third-year graduate student in the area of Genetics, Genomics, and Bioinformatics within the Department of Animal Science. Halie’s research focuses on using the domesticated silver fox as a genomic model to identify genetic variants associated with anxiety, aggression and psychological resilience.  She learned to program through an introductory programming course for students in the social sciences offered at Brown University and is excited to be involved in developing a similar gateway at Illinois.

Ayla Stein
Faculty Organizer
ORCID: 0000-0002-6829-221X
Ayla is a Metadata Librarian at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She earned her M.S. in Information at the University of Michigan School of Information, specializing in Library & Information Science, Preservation of Information, and Archives & Records Management. Prior to joining the University of Illinois Library, Ayla was the Web Services Librarian Fellow at the University of Houston Libraries.