Robby Rollins, High Risk Research & Data Facilitator

Profile

Like Stanford Research Computing’s other research data facilitators and consultants, Robby Rollins spends much of his time troubleshooting support requests and writing documentation and training materials. But Robby also wears a formal data security hat, monitoring and assuring compliance on the Nero GCP and Carina High Risk Data systems. 

Robby is one of our key facilitator-consultants assisting Nero GCP users. In addition, he’s the SRC subject matter expert for the project to bring both Nero and Carina into NIST SP 800-171 compliance to satisfy DOD & DOE contract requirements as well as possible future NIH requirements.

Before joining Stanford Research Computing, Robby worked at NASA where he developed skills and expertise in high performance computing (HPC) and cybersecurity. His past professional experiences also include working with medical bluetooth device interfaces (insulin pumps, pace makers, and etc.), network emulation tools, and automatic log analysis.

Robby’s interest in computers began In high school with his curiosity about how the computer games he was playing were made. His high school offered no computer science classes — it was a small town — so he started working for the school’s IT help desk, supporting staff and fellow students, and he both enjoyed and excelled at that.

Then, in college, when trying to decide on a computing major, he avoided the programming track (“Too many languages!,” he says, maybe only half-joking) and pursued systems administration and other specialties, instead.

In graduate school at Michigan Technology University, Robby then honed in on his academic and research specialty, health informatics.

Robby cites a couple of ongoing Stanford collaborations that are among the most notable and rewarding for him. The first is with the students and research colleagues of Dr. Nigam Shah (the Nigam Shah Lab focuses on using existing health data to improve healthcare methods and treatment). Other work that Robby highlights: working with researchers at the Brain Development & Education Lab on data from the ROAR assessment platform, directed by Graduate School of Education professor Jason D. Yeatman, and supporting SRC’s collaboration with the School of Medicine’s Research IT Team on STARR OMOP system applying AI to clinical data re-use. (See below for details about all three efforts.)

Notable Projects

• Support of the Nigam Shah Lab, Stanford Medicine Department of Biological Data Science around HPC usage and accounts. The lab works to create novel methods to learn from patient-level health data, answer clinical questions that enable better medical decisions at the point of care, and research safe, ethical, and cost-effective strategies for using predictive models to guide mitigating care actions.
• Support of the ROAR assessment platform around HPC usage and accounts. ROAR is a program developed by the Brain Development and Education Lab in the Graduate School of Education, ROAR combines neuroimaging with educational interventions to further the understanding of plasticity in the human brain. For children with learning disabilities such as dyslexia, ROAR delivers personalized intervention tailored to a child’s unique pattern of brain maturation.
• Support of STARR OMOP STAnford Medicine Research Data Repository, OMOP CDM (Clinical Data Model), an SRC collaboration with the School of Medicine’s Research IT team. From the STARR website: The goal of STARR is to bring the clinical data from its raw state to “analysis-ready” state and make the data “self-service”. Researchers are able to reuse the collected data to derive novel insights, support patient care, and improve care quality using Artificial Intelligence (AI) approaches. Such efforts can improve the standard of care today and also hold the promise to improve health outcomes and reduce cost of care in the coming years.