Stanford
Stanford Research Computing

Mark Piercy, Research Computing Technical Liaison

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Computing interests and specialties:

  • bioinformatics
  • genomics
  • SLURM
  • Linux

Came to us from:

Profile

For Mark Piercy, the keys to supporting academic researchers effectively are flexibility and hands-on familiarity with what the everyday work of a researcher is really like: 

“Most of the work of research is experiments. There’s a lot of trial and error, as well as discipline and precision. To accommodate this, the life cycle of support collaborations with researchers has to be flexible.”

Mark has been working at Stanford for over 15 years in research and software development. From 2012-2015 — the years before Mark joined the Stanford Research Computing (SRC) team — he worked for Folding@Home, which provides a powerful distributed computing infrastructure where participants’ CPUs and GPUs are aggregated to run software that generates protein folding predictions from researcher's data.

It was at the Folding@Home where Mark significantly deepened his understanding of the work of scientific and academic researchers — including the life cycles of grant funding, research and publication. (Mark had a hand in obtaining both NSF and NIH grants for Folding@Home.)

“I have great sympathy for researchers over the intense pressure they're under to publish and fund their research” Mark says.

Mark’s Folding@Home experiences also gave him new insights and skill in user outreach, and in generating enthusiasm among users and communities.  At Stanford now, most of Mark’s day to day collaborations are with researchers in the School of Humanities and Sciences, to whom he is Research Computing’s primary liaison. Faculty PIs, lab staff, and students doing scholarship across diverse and interdisciplinary fields sometimes need assistance writing and running scripts or moving and storing their research data. Mark is always ready to step in and help.

When he joined SRC in 2015, Mark built the organization’s first website and designed and implemented our first onboarding program for the Sherlock compute cluster — as well as an outreach process for contacting new faculty to help determine which systems and services best fit their computational needs. 

2025 is Mark’s tenth year with the team, and he continues to guide programs that support researchers. Partnering with Christina Gancayco and our other consultant-instructors, Mark regularly reviews and improves SRC’s training curriculum and outreach efforts. And as a lead HPC instructor, he still conducts the monthly Sherlock onboarding sessions that he started years ago, as well as other introductory HPC classes and resource estimation workshops.

Notable Projects