A productive, engaging and fun IT Reunion

SLAC IT recently held it’s second IT Onsite Reunion April 11-12, bringing together 90+ IT employees, many of whom traveled many miles to join the event. The Onsite Reunion Planning Team put together a fun and engaging program over the two days. It was also a time for teams to gather in person to discuss team goals, issues and solutions. Bringing the IT band back together is no small task and our amazing IT Reunion Planning team did a fantastic job! THANK YOU Swetha Danala, Soledad Merlo, Kornelia Kowszewicz, Isabella Parkinson, Dorothy Leung, Bobbi Woody-Mistriel, and Amanda Sosa for a great two days!

Day 1 Highlights

Dr. Stephen Streiffer, Interim SLAC Director welcomed the IT staff to SLAC, followed by Chief Information Officer, Jon Russell’s State of SLAC IT remarks. Staff achievements and milestones were also celebrated which included the announcement of the retirement of our beloved Shirley Gruber, who served Stanford and SLAC for 43.5 years! Shirley most enjoyed working with “dedicated, collaborative, and enthusiastic colleagues” and stated that, “Stanford is a large and exciting institution. Seize opportunities to move around and develop your career. Change often brings about new opportunities for growth and development.  It’s a good thing.”

There were also presentations on the Pinnacle Project by Isabella Parkinson, the IAM Program by Bruce Vincent, ZTA and CrowdStrike by Erwin Lopez and the Firewall Replacement project by Mark Foster.

Have you ever built a marshmallow catapult? Well, IT folks had the pleasure of doing so as  a team building exercise. Ten teams were given a spoon, wooden skewers, a short length of tape and a few marshmallows to build a catapult. Each team was given two chances to catapult their marshmallow the farthest.

Day 2 Highlights

Back by popular demand was the Science Around the Lab segment, this reunion included an awesome presentation by our friends at TID, Yemi Adesanya on the SRCF II and S3DF projects as well as an exciting presentation by Alan Fry on the MEC-U project. We also learned more about the new Cornerstone Training System from ESH’s Paul Bloom.

IT staff also gave informative and entertaining “lightning talks” on subjects such as “Earnest on ERP” by Dave Kopa and Rito Yanez-Soria and “Name makes Time Look Easy” by Mark McCullough. As well as more technical topics as presented by Karl Amrhein on the “Unix Platform Roadmap” and Venkat Samineni who answered the question, “What is SID?”