---
title: "CARC adds two new Research Computing Facilitation Specialists"
description: "The University of New Mexico’s (UNM) Center for Advanced Research Computing (CARC) welcomes two new staff members to support UNM researchers with using the CARC high performance computing (HPC) systems."
type: News
tags:
  - News
date: "2022"
generated:
  by: "process:scripts/port_legacy_pages.py"
  at: "2026-09-10T00:00:00Z"
sources:
  - id: carc-web
    resource: "https://carc.unm.edu/news--events/News/carc-adds-two-new-research-computing-facilitation-specialists.html"
    title: "CARC adds two new Research Computing Facilitation Specialists (carc.unm.edu)"
    author: "team:unm-carc"
---

# CARC adds two new Research Computing Facilitation Specialists

<p class="carc-byline">2022</p>

![](/assets/research-computing-facilitation-specialists-kevin-fotso-and-tannor-brown.png)

The University of New Mexico’s (UNM) Center for Advanced Research Computing
(CARC) welcomes two new staff members to support UNM researchers with using
the CARC high performance computing (HPC) systems. Kevin Fotso and Tannor
Brown will play lead roles in working with researchers from the College of
Arts and Sciences to identify, design, and implement their research computing
needs. “We are the bridge between researchers and CARC, especially if they
have not used CARC before,” Brown explains.

Researchers often conduct experiments which produce vast amounts of raw data.
This creates the need to find a way to efficiently analyze that data. Time is
particularly important to researchers, especially when they are working on
time-limited grants. This is where CARC’s HPC systems and Fotso and Brown come
into play. Part of their job is to help researchers decide if it would be more
efficient to run the data on their own computers, or to connect to CARC’s HPC
systems and run their data on potentially hundreds of processors
simultaneously. If they decide to use CARC’s systems, Fotso and Brown can help
them connect. This way, researchers can obtain their results much faster and
much more efficiently having spread the processing across multiple computer
systems.

Fotso elaborates, “Time makes a big difference in someone's research. If they
have to run an experiment that is under a two-year grant, [they need to]
finish the experiment in maybe in a year or year and a half so they can start
writing their paper. So, if one experiment takes a month [to run], that is a
lot of time. By doing HPC processing we can accelerate that time to one or two
days. That is the kind of thing we take pride in. We can see the researcher’s
progress and the researcher is happy, and we are happy.”

Fotso and Brown will specialize in all aspects of Linux-based computing
platforms. They will also aid researchers in installing and maintaining
off-the-shelf and custom software packages, as well as helping researchers
design and debug complex research workflows. Additionally, they will manage
and install common research programming languages such as Python, R, and
C/C++. They will also manage licensing support, license servers, and
investigate compliance issues related to research software and data.

Brown joins CARC from the College of Arts and Sciences where he worked as a
Technical Analyst. His Bachelor’s degree is in Management Information Systems,
and he is in his second year of the Master’s program in Cybersecurity and
Business Analytics at UNM’s Anderson School of Management. “I am glad to be
finally going into HPC computing. That is the path I have been wanting to take
for a while and I am glad the opportunity came up for this position … so I can
continue to learn [and support] research and different faculty needs," remarks
Brown.

Fotso’s Bachelor’s degree is in Biomedical Engineering from the Illinois
Institute of Technology and his Master's, also in Biomedical Engineering, is
from UNM. He is currently working on his PhD at UNM with a research focus on
multiple sclerosis and building models to predict disability and lesions in
the brain. He has a background working with Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI)
images to establish how water diffuses in the brain as detailed in his paper:
[Diffusion Tensor Spectroscopic Imaging of the Human Brain in Children and
Adults](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5409876/){target=_blank}.
Last semester, Fotso worked as a Graduate Assistant at CARC dealing with help
tickets and contributing to CARC’s help documentation on GitHub.
[QuickBytes](https://github.com/UNM-CARC/QuickBytes){target=_blank} features a
series of tutorials on how to use specific software on CARC systems. Fotso
concludes, “I've loved this job since Day One, I never loved a job like I love
CARC.”

When contacting Fotso and Brown you can expect a quick response, usually
within two business days. “Our job is about answering well and trying to help
the user as fast as possible with their research,” states Fotso. Arts and
Sciences researchers needing help can[email](mailto:researchtech@unm.edu) to
request support.