SAIL Brings on Four New Software Engineers
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To meet the increasing demand for research software engineering across BU’s Charles River and Medical campuses, the SAIL continues to grow. In addition to expanding the lab’s student intern program this year, SAIL brought on four new software engineers, Ben Getchell, Dany Fu, Sarah Leinicke, and Lucy Qin.
Ben Getchell actually joined the SAIL team as a Software Engineer Intern in the lab’s inaugural internship program in 2016. He has worked with Cathie Jo Martin (Political Science, CAS) on her Hariri Research Award, researching and applying natural language processing techniques to a data set of British and Danish novels to explore how views of education influence historical trends. After 1.5 years interning at SAIL, Ben continues to contribute to a variety of cybersecurity and big data efforts as a full-time software engineer.
As a full-time staff member, Ben will design, develop, and deploy software systems and platforms that deliver cybersecurity and secure multi-party computation capabilities in real-world scenarios. Ben will be working on the NSF-funded CICI “Trustworthy Computing over Protected Datasets” effort, as well as building open source libraries, applications, systems, and databases in domains such as data science, digital humanities, cybersecurity, and others.
Prior to joining SAIL, Dany Fu was a Research Engineer at Apogee Research. She has experience developing mobile, web, and back-end applications and has collaborated with researchers of various academic backgrounds while working on DARPA cybersecurity programs. Dany has also held positions at Verizon and at the Federal Trade Commissions. Dany holds a B.S. in Computer Science and Business Administration from Pepperdine University. At SAIL Dany will work on software systems and platforms that enable and enhance genetic circuit design automation across multiple institutions.
Sarah Leinicke is a former public interest attorney. She worked at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the Center for International Environmental Law. Sarah holds a B.A. in English Literature from Smith College, a J.D. from American University, and a Master’s Degree in Software Engineering from Harvard Extension School with a concentration in data science. Prior to joining SAIL, Sarah was an Associate Software Engineer at the Parsons Corporation, where she developed software to support big data and cybersecurity applications.
Sarah and Dany are collaborating with PI Doug Densmore (ENG) and his lab on the DARPA Synergistic Discovery and Design (SD2) effort entitled “Genetic circuit design for extreme environments enabled by models extracted from petabyte+ perturbation analyses”. Through this effort, they are also working with partners from MIT and University of Washington.
Lucy Qin will focus on software systems and platforms that deliver cybersecurity and secure multi-party computation capabilities in real-world scenarios. Prior to joining SAIL, Lucy was a member of MIT Lincoln Lab’s technical staff, where she developed situational awareness tools for first responders and worked on generic test harnesses for resource adaptive software. Lucy graduated from Tufts University with a degree in computer science and economics.
Lucy is working on a number of MPC-related efforts, including two NSF-funded projects: “Modular Platform for Web-based Secure Multi-Party Analytics” led by PI Andrei Lapets (CAS) and “Trustworthy Computing over Protected Datasets” led by PI Mayank Varia (RISCS).
The SAIL team continues to develop solutions and expertise that cross disciplinary boundaries and multiply the benefits of research efforts to bring greater value to the BU research community.