Derek Weitzel is a Research Associate Professor in the School of Computing at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, working with the Holland Computing Center and national cyberinfrastructure collaborations including the Open Science Grid.
In April 2025, Nebraska announced his promotion to Research Associate Professor. He has worked in and around HCC since 2006 while earning his bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees at UNL. His dissertation, Enabling Distributed Scientific Computing on the Campus (2015), reflects the same theme that still drives his work today: making distributed systems practical and dependable for researchers.
His day-to-day engineering work spans distributed compute operations, data federation and caching, observability pipelines, and security/authorization services. In practice, that includes production systems in the OSG ecosystem, data access and monitoring services around XRootD and OSDF, and platform operations across research Kubernetes environments.
Across publications and deployed infrastructure, he focuses on operational reliability and scale: improving data movement performance, reducing friction for researcher onboarding, and translating research prototypes into sustainable services used by scientific communities.
His research and engineering focus on:
- Distributed computing and data management for scientific workloads.
- Data federation and caching systems for high-throughput research.
- Network monitoring, diagnostics, and operational analytics.
- Security and authorization models for large shared infrastructures.
Across his publications and production systems, Derek’s work spans projects such as OSDF/StashCache, XRootD monitoring, SciAuth/SciTokens, and Kubernetes-based research platforms including NRP.
Selected references:
- UNL School of Computing promotion announcement (April 9, 2025)
- UNL CSE announcement: Weitzel, Yu receive promotions
- Dissertation: Enabling Distributed Scientific Computing on the Campus