Curriculum Vita

Teaching Philosophy

The hallmarks of my teaching philosophy are setting expectations, authenticity, and professionalism.

Students will rise or fall to the expectations we set of them. There is no stronger message we can send to the students we teach about our confidence in them than by assuming they are capable of performing at a high level, supporting them to ensure that they can get and stay on track when this challenges them, and rewarding them for excellent performance. This cannot be done in the classroom alone, or even by a single faculty member. It is a team effort by a department. It encompasses curriculum design, recruiting, advisement, and tutoring. As a faculty member I support high curriculum standards, regular and pro-active advising, and involvement of student peer-mentors to partner with faculty in engineering student success.

In and outside of the classroom, students are best engaged by experiences that are authentic and personal. It is important for students to be involved in research activity and have access to research faculty early in their academic career. This provides for high impact learning experiences that give students a vision of where they want to be. I’ve seen this as crucial for my students in the past. Advanced students get opportunities to move beyond coursework. Struggling students get motivation to understand why what they learn in the classroom is relevant. The involvement of a department's senior faculty in the freshman experience is vital and a key element of retention and student success.

Finally, our students come into the room with a range of life experiences. Some have great privilege. Some have financial and social obstacles. Some have learning disabilities. Some have a history of harassment, prejudice, and abuse. While we cannot always control the world outside, we can make the classroom a place of professionalism and ethical behavior, particularly in the way we treat our students and in the way we ask our students to treat each other. The classroom should be a place free of harassment, intolerance, and discrimination. The faculty member can set a tone for this by always acting professionally with students, and by setting in place transparent and uniform policies for grading and assessment. Additionally, pro-active classroom management can be put into place that makes it clear that the university is the beginning of the students’ professional life, not the end of their childhood.

By doing this we can produce graduates who are competent, confident, and ethical.

Research Interests

My most prolific area of scholarship throughout my career has been in the area of computational science education. I’ve managed and developed Education, Outreach, and Training curriculum and workshop opportunities through the National Computational Science Institute. I’ve catalogued and managed databases of EOT artifacts through the Computational Science Education Reference Desk. I’ve developed unique hardware/software/operating system solutions for HPC training as part of the LittleFe development team. I’ve helped to establish and develop the Journal of Computational Science Education.

Moving forward in the future, my interest in CSE Education is to continue as an active member of the ACM’s SIGHPC Education chapter, and continue my efforts in finding, cataloguing, and reviewing excellent EOT artifacts to help train the next generation of CSE professionals.

I’ve found in the past that a careful approach to developing CSE Education tools can have impacts both in and out of education. My work creating curricula on stochastic optimization also led to the stochastic optimization library that powers an astrophysics project I am involved in validating and characterizing certain types of exoplanet measurements.

I’m currently interested in developing tools for scientific visualization in Virtual Reality. This began out of an effort to fund and establish a Visualization Center at Kean University. We were awarded $600,000 from NSF to purchase a CAVE facility, which is currently active on campus. I had found that software tools had a steep learning curve, and getting students and faculty onto our resource provided substantial challenges. I moved away from traditional Sci-Vis software to Unity Game Engine, which not only fit better into our students’ curriculum and provided and easier pathway for them, but also provided a multi-architecture platform that allowed me to develop visuals for hardware ranging from mobile platforms, to low cost headsets, to flat PC screens, and up to our CAVE facility.

The libraries for performing Sci-Vis in Unity, however, have been woefully lacking. Attempts at cross compiling with existing visualization libraries have produced results that perform poorly and are difficult to maintain. Professional grade visualization tools have been slow to adopt methods that allow a variety of hardware platforms, especially VR and AR solutions.

This has led me to develop the Unity Visualization Toolkit. The UVT is a set of libraries for Unity Game Engine written in C# and native for Unity. It includes objects for structured and unstructured data, and for 3D visualization using isocontours, volumetric rendering, threshold plots, glyph and quiver plots, surface plots, and other rendering types. The UVT is available at https://github.com/joinerda/unity-visualization-toolkit. My plan for the near future is to continue development of the UVT and to disseminate it as widely as possible. The UVT is also intended to be the basis of a multi-user multi-platform VR enabled data visualization collaboratory.

This has proven to be a great project for involving undergraduates, as the level of programming and mathematics map well to undergraduate curriculum, and also works well as an interdisciplinary measure—students from different fields can bring in different data and help to develop the toolsets necessary to visualize their data.

In my Non-CSE Education portions of my research, my primary interest is in the application of informatics algorithms to problems in astrophysics, and validating and understanding the limitations of those techniques.

I’ve started a project using a combination of Monte-Carlo Markov Chain analysis to build posterior distributions of multi-planet fits to radial velocity detected exosolar planetary systems. These systems are inherently noisy, and false positives are a real concern in data analysis. I am using MCMC to reproduce fits of multi-planet system, particularly those where planets are in dispute between different researchers, and feeding those posterior distributions into massively parallel ensembles of N-Body simulations to determine the stability of the predicted planetary systems. My current plan for expanding this is to move my current workflow which is designed for traditional clusters onto CUDA enabled hardware.

I’m additionally interested in applying techniques to other models in astrophysics, such as fitting of radiative transfer models to observed spectra, and have preliminary work in these areas.

Curriculum Vita

David A. Joiner, Ph.D.

NJ Center for Science and Technology Education

Union, NJ 07083

djoiner@kean.edu

Professional Preparation:

· B.S., Cum Laude, Physics, (Sep. 1989 - May 1993), University of Texas, San Antonio, TX.

· Ph.D., M.S., Physics, (Sep. 1993 - Dec. 1999), Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY.

Summary:

25+ years education and experience in applying computing to interesting problems in science and education, and in training future generations of computational science professionals. Developed a major national digital library of computational science education learning artifacts. Research techniques include finite difference methods, integration of large systems of stiff differential equations, N-body dynamic simulation, and non-linear optimization using stochastic methods including uncertainty estimation using Monte-Carlo Markov Chain. Programming languages include C/C++, Fortran, Java, Perl, and MATLAB, including parallel programming using MPI, OpenMP, and CUDA, which I have taught at a graduate level.

Appointments:

· Kenneth L. Estabrook Professor of Science, Technology, and Mathematics Education, August 2004 – present, Kean University, Department of Science and Technology Education

· Courses taught include STME 2700 and 2800 (Physical Systems I and II—calculus based introductory physics course), STME 2000, 2100, 2200, and 2300 (NJCSTM Core math sequence covering topics in differential and integral calculus, linear algebra, and statistics), CPS 1231 (Computer Organization and Programming), CPS 5965 (High Performance Computing), STME 5630 and 5631 (dynamical systems modeling and visualization and analysis of data).

· Maintain 11 TeraFlop 130 node cluster obtained through NSF MRI grant.

· Maintain 3-wall CAVE facility obtained through NSF MRI grant.

· Chairperson of University Senate 2014-2016

· Staff Scientist, Oct 1999 – August 2004, Shodor Education Foundation, Inc., Durham, NC.

· Primary responsibility: creation and delivery of computational science based learning materials, including supervision of intern teams to develop materials as well as leadership of faculty training teams.

· Additional responsibilities: Purchasing officer, System Administrator.

· Adjunct Lecturer, Aug 2000 – May 2002, UNC Greensboro, Greensboro, NC.

· Conceptual Astronomy: ~100 student non-major lecture course.

· Research/Teaching Assistant: June 1994 – Nov 1999, Dept. of Physics, Applied Physics, and Astronomy, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York.

· Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Department of Physics, Applied Physics, and Astronomy—1998-99 Eppenstein Graduate Teaching Assistant Award

· Research Associate: June 1998 – Aug 1998, Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Graduate Student Research Program, Research and Development Laboratories, Hanscom AFB, MA.

· Computer System Administrator: Sep. 1997 – Sep 1998, Huntington B. Hill Laboratory, Dept. of Physics, Applied Physics, and Astronomy, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York.

· Teaching Assistant: Sep. 1993 – May 1995, Dept. of Physics, Applied Physics, and Astronomy, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York.

· Teaching Assistant: July 1993, Alliance for Education, San Antonio, Texas.

· Technical Staff Assistant: Sep. 1992 – Apr 1993, Dept. of Earth and Physical Sciences, University of Texas at San Antonio, San Antonio, Texas.

· Tutor: May 1991 – May 1993, Help Is Here! tutoring service, San Antonio, Texas.

Research Activities:

· Computational Science Education

· CSERD: Co-PI on the Computational Science Education Reference Desk, a digital library of computational science objects to be used in the classroom. Helped to create and am currently an editor for the Journal of Computational Science Education. (http://shodor.org/refdesk) (http://jocse.org)

· NCSI: Lead workshop instructor for the National Computational Science Institute, including development of the NCSI curriculum on parallel and distributed computing.

· Little Fe: Development of software to teach parallel computing concepts using the BCCD (Bootable Cluster CD) and LittleFe system. (http://littlefe.org)

· Development of “World of Data,” software for performing scientific visualization in virtual reality environments.

· Exoplanetary System Modeling

· I perform N-Body modeling to determine the stability of proposed multi-planet systems around other stars, coupled with a Monte-Carlo Markov Chain analysis of Keplerian orbital fits to radial velocity data, in order to probe the posterior distribution of multi-planet models.

· Non-linear Stochastic Optimization

· I maintain an open-source library of parallel C routines for genetic algorithms, simulated annealing, and Monte-Carlo Markov Chain analysis, particularly applied to the problem of fitting models to data.( http://sourceforge.net/projects/optlib/)

· Radiative Transfer

· As a graduate student, I studied the solution of the polarized radiative transfer equation for 1 dimensional symmetry problems (shells, spheres) using long characteristic finite difference equations. I’ve since applied this problem as part of a non-linear stochastic optimization using genetic algorithms and simulated annealing, determining that there is a degeneracy in the spherical continuum radiative transfer problem that I am in the process of characterizing.

· Chemical Kinetics in Astrophysical Environments

· My thesis work involved studying the chemical kinetics of grain formation in classical novae. This included approximations to chemical reaction rates for small grain sizes based on C-C and C-H binding energies and assumptions about the amount of H present in the environment, as well as binning and moment techniques to reduce the number of kinetic equations required for large (1 micron) grain growth. The system of equations was stiff, and evolved in a moving, dissipating, cooling ejection shell.

· Current work focuses on coupling this model to existing astrochemistry databases.

Synergistic Activities:

· Co-PI for The Computational Science Education Reference Desk, an online repository designed to help undergraduate educators learn to use computational science in their teaching and research. Duties include acting as an editor for the Journal of Computational Science Education (jocse.org) (funded by National Science Digital Library grant DUE-0435187 [$2,800,000, 2004-2008] and National Science Digital Library grant DUE-0937910 [$725,000, 2009-2011])

· Maintains high performance computing equipment at Kean University including a 1000-core cluster and a CAVE facility for use by faculty and students at Kean University. (funded by National Science Foundation, Office of Cyberinfrastructure, Major Research Instrumentation project to establish CAVE at Kean University, [$593,000, March 2010-March 2012] and National Science Foundation, Office of Cyberinfrastructure, Major Research Instrumentation project to establish HPC Cluster at Kean University, [$420,000, August 2007-August 2010])

· Have developed workshop curriculum for the National Computational Science Institute as a lead instructor since 2001 on content in high performance computing, computational physics, and data visualization, including content for a series of MSI-HPC workshops to help faculty, administration, and technical staff at minority serving institutions gain the knowledge and skills needed to increase the role of high performance and cluster computing at their institutions.

· Development of new curriculum for New Jersey Center for Science, Technology, and Mathematics, as faculty on the initial staff for the Center since 2004. Program is an integrated science/math/technology honors program at Kean University. Named Kenneth L. Estabrook Professor of Science, Technology, and Mathematics Education at Kean University (2008.)

· Member of Faculty Senate, Kean University, 2013-2019.

· Chair of Faculty Senate, Kean University, 2014-2016.

· Member, Advisory Board, Union County Magnet High School STEM Academy, 2014.

Additional Computational Skills:

· Computer Programming Languages/Environments: C/C++, Fortran, Java, C#, Python, Perl, PHP, MATLAB, R, HTML, MySQL, Unity, CG/HLSL, PovRay, VRML.

· High Performance/Parallel Computing: MPI, OpenMP, OpenACC, CUDA.

Publications, Selected Presentations, and Software Products:

· Eduard Ayguade, Lluc Alvarez, Fabio Banchelli, Martin Burtscher, Arturo Gonzalez-Escribano, Julian Gutierrez, David A. Joiner, David Kaeli, Fritz Previlon, Eduardo Rodriguez-Gutiez, David P. Bunde. Peachy Parallel Assignments (EduHPC 2018). Workshop on Education for High Performance Computing (EduHPC). https://grid.cs.gsu.edu/~tcpp/curriculum/?q=peachy Dallas, 2018. (Peer-reviewed curriculum module, 5/13 submissions accepted)

· Joiner, D.A., The Unity Visualization Toolkit. https://github.com/joinerda/unity-visualization-toolkit. 2018. (software)

· Joiner D.A., Sul C., Dragomir D., Kane S.R., Kress M.E. A Consistent Orbital Stability Analysis for the GJ 581 System. The Astrophysical Journal 788:160. June 2014.

· Joiner, D. A. and Walters, J. Scaling and Visualization of N-Body Gravitational Dynamics with GalaxSeeHPC. Accepted to Journal of Computational Science Education 5:1, August 2014.

· Joiner, D. A., Sul, Cesar, Kane, S., Dragomir, D., Kress, M., Shanks, K. Orbital Stability Analysis of GJ 581 and HD 10180. American Astronomical Society Meeting Abstracts. 2014.

· Kress, Monika, Joiner, D. A., Armstrong, J. C., and Sul, C. N-body Stability Analysis of Gliese 581. American Astronomical Society Meeting Abstracts. 2013

· Howard, J., Padron, O., Morreale, P., and Joiner, D. 2012. Applications of Computational Science: Data-Intensive Computing for Student Projects. Computing in Science and Eng. 14, 2 (Mar. 2012), 84-89. DOI= http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/MCSE.2012.18

· Joiner, D. A. "GalaxSee HPC II: Scaling N-Body Simulations." Undergraduate Petascale Education Program. http://shodor.org/petascale/materials/UPModules/NBodyScaling/. 2012. (peer-reviewed curriculum module)

· Joiner, D. A. "Order from Chaos: A Sampling of Stochastic Optimization Algorithms." Undergraduate Petascale Education Program. http://shodor.org/petascale/materials/UPModules/StochOpt/. 2012. (peer-reviewed curriculum module)

· Joiner, D.A. “They built a supercomputer WHERE? The challenges and opportunities of supercomputing at a primarily teaching institution.” (Colloquium Presentation)

· University of Central Oklahoma, 2012.

· San Jose State University, 2013.

· Morreale, P. and Joiner, D. Changing perceptions of computer science and computational thinking among high school teachers. J. Comput. Sci. Coll. 26, 6 (Jun. 2011), 71-77. 2011.

· Morreale, P. and Joiner, D. Reaching future computer scientists. Commun. ACM 54, 4 (Apr. 2011), 121-124. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1924421.1924448. 2011.

· Joiner, D. A. "GalaxSee HPC Module 1: The N-Body Problem, Serial and Parallel Simulation." Undergraduate Petascale Education Program. http://shodor.org/petascale/materials/UPModules/NBody/. 2011. (peer-reviewed curriculum module)

· Joiner, D. A. GalaxSeeHPC. http://sourceforge.net/projects/galaxseehpc/. 2010-2012. (software)

· Fitz Gibbon, A., Joiner, D. A., Neeman, H., Peck, C., and Thompson, S. 2010. Teaching high performance computing to undergraduate faculty and undergraduate students. In Proceedings of the 2010 Teragrid Conference (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, August 02 - 05, 2010). TG '10. ACM, New York, NY, 1-7. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1838574.1838581

· Morreale, P., Joiner, D., and Chang, G. 2010. Connecting undergraduate programs to high school students: teacher workshops on computational thinking and computer science. J. Comput. Sci. Coll. 25, 6 (Jun. 2010), 191-197.

· Joiner, D.A. OptLib. http://sourceforge.net/projects/optlib/. 2008-2012. (software).

· Joiner, D. A., Panoff, R. M., Gray, P., Murphy, T., and Peck, C. “Supercomputer based laboratories and the evolution of the personal computer based laboratory.” American Journal of Physics, Vol. 76, p. 379. 2008.

· Joiner, D., Peck, C., Murphy, T., and Gray, P. 2008. Education, Outreach, and Training for High-Performance Computing. Computing in Science and Eng. 10, 5 (Sep. 2008), 40-45. DOI= http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/MCSE.2008.129. 2008.

· Hassinger, Jonathan and Joiner, David A. Teacher’s Toolkit: The Computational Science Education Reference Desk—Rising to meet the challenge of computational science education. Science Scope, vol. 30, no. 7, p. 12, 2007.

· Joiner, David A. Developing a Mobile Environment for Teaching High Performance Computing. American Association of Physics Teachers, Summer Meeting, Greensboro, NC. 2007. (invited presentation)

· Tanase, Diana, Joiner, David and Stuart-Moore, Jonathan. Computational Science Educational Reference Desk – CSERD A digital library for students, educators, and scientists. D-Lib Magazine, vol. 12, no. 9, 2006.

· DeLuca, J. and Joiner, D. A. 2006. Incorporating computational science activities in high school algebra. In Proceedings of the 6th ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (Chapel Hill, NC, USA, June 11 - 15, 2006). JCDL '06. ACM, New York, NY, 356-356. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1141753.1141851

· Joiner, David A. Ensuring Quality of Digital Library Learning Objects for Computational Physics and Astronomy Education. Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society. 2006.

· Tanase, D., Bruce, M., Stuart-Moore, J., and Joiner, D. A. 2006. Scaffolding the infrastructure of the computational science digital library. In Proceedings of the 6th ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (Chapel Hill, NC, USA, June 11 - 15, 2006). JCDL'06. ACM Press, New York, NY, 256-257.

· Joiner, D. A., Gray, P., Murphy, T., and Peck, C. 2006. Teaching parallel computing to science faculty: best practices and common pitfalls. In Proceedings of the Eleventh ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming (New York, New York, USA, March 29 - 31, 2006). PPoPP '06. ACM Press, New York, NY, 239-246. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1122971.1123007

· Joiner, David A. The Computational Science Education Reference Desk Peer Review Collection Tool (Lead Developer for the CSERD Infrastructure Design Team) 2005. (software)

· David A. Joiner, Steven Gordon, Scott Lathrop, Marilyn McClelland, Dennis Stevenson. “Applying Verification, Validation, and Accreditation Processes to Digital Libraries” ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL’05), ACM Press, 382, 2005.

· Thomas Murphy, Charlie Peck, Paul Gray, and David Joiner. “New Directions for Computational Science Education.” HPCWire, Vol. 14 No. 34, August 26, 2005.

· Sarah M. Diesburg, Paul A. Gray, David Joiner. "High Performance Computing Environments Without the Fuss: The Bootable Cluster CD." International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium, vol. 14, no. 14, p. 252a, 19th 2005.

· Joiner, D. A., Leung, C. M. Modeling the Transport of Polarized Radiation due to Scattering in Spherical Dust Shells. The Astrophysical Journal. Vol 593. 2003.

· Joiner, D. A., Panoff, R. M. The National Computational Science Institute: Computational Astronomy for Astronomy Educators. Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society. 2001.

· Robert Gotwals, David Joiner, Kirstin Riesbeck, and the Shodor Education Foundation, Inc.,OS411: Computational Atmospheric Science (www.shodor.org/os411), 2001.

· Joiner, D. A., Stevenson, D. E., Panoff, R. M. The Computational Science Education Reference Desk: A tool for increasing inquiry based learning in the science classroom. Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society. 2000.

· David A. Joiner and the Shodor Education Foundation, Inc., Stella2Java (www.shodor,org/stella2java), 2000-2004. (software)

· Joiner, D. A., Leung, C. M. The Nucleation and Growth of Dust Grains in Nova Shells. Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society. 1999.

· Joiner, D.A. and the Shodor Education Foundation, Inc., GalaxSee. http://www.shodor.org/master/galaxsee/. 1999-2012. (software)

· Joiner, David Andrew (1999). The nucleation and growth of dust grains in nova shells. Ph.D. dissertation, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, United States -- New York. http://proquest.umi.com/pqdlink?did=731809191&Fmt=7&clientId=44870&RQT=309&VName=PQD

· Joiner, David A., Egan, Michael P., Leung, Chun Ming. Modeling Grain Formation in Classical Nova Shells. Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society. 1998.

· Joiner, D., Leung, C. Modeling the Transport of Polarized Radiation due to Scattering in Spherical Dust Shells. Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society. 1996.