NCSA Welcomes Kenton McHenry to the Center Stage! October 7, 2024 Profiles LeadershipSoftware and Applications Share this page: Twitter Facebook LinkedIn Email Catching a small fish. By Megan Meave Johnson Photo captions provided by Kenton. All photos, credit to Kenton McHenry. Click on a photo to see a larger version. Making a balloon octopus for Santiago at his moving away party at Riggs. If you work at NCSA, you probably already know Kenton McHenry. Kenton has been at NCSA for 16 years, and he’s been a part of the Center’s leadership team for six of those years. Since he began working at NCSA, Kenton has helped grow the Software Directorate into what it is today. His team is particularly close, as Kenton takes the time to build camaraderie among team members. But you might find out something new about Kenton in this month’s Center Stage – he’s a balloon animal expert, for starters – so without further ado, here’s Kenton in his own words. What is your title and team? I am Associate Director for our Software directorate. We are made up of largely Research Software Engineers as well as Research UIX designers, Research Data Engineers and Research Scientists. Together we support the growing needs around software engineering within research. Me with my mother and father at one year of age, and me now. Tell us a cool fact about your job. During the pandemic, my son needed something while I was working at my home office. I told him I was working. He then said: “No, you are not! All you are doing is texting and emailing people! That’s not a real job!” I have to admit it does feel that way sometimes. At the end of the day, I ask myself, “What did I accomplish today.” This wasn’t the case when I still programmed, where I knew exactly what I had completed each day. Kenton, so young, so stupid. I loved my job when I was a Research Programmer (i.e., a Research Software Engineer today). When my boss left and I inherited the group, though, that all changed. Leading is really hard. You need more incentive than a high salary to do the work – in my case, that incentive is taking care of my colleagues while simultaneously trying to prove myself and make a difference. In many ways, you go from having one boss to having many bosses (your new boss above you + all your peer managers + all of your staff!). Ideally, you need all of them working in alignment. Any problem with any individual can quickly become your problem as you must restore things to working order. Soft funding is an additional challenge on top of all that. Though, I inherited several funded projects from my predecessor. I hadn’t yet landed my own funding grant. This caused a great deal of stress. I kept worrying about letting the team down, having funding fall through and all of us losing our jobs. Kenton speaking at the California State University San Bernardino 2015 Commencement after receiving the CSUSB College of Natural Sciences Outstanding Alumnus award. Then, something happened four or so years ago. It wasn’t planned by any means, and I honestly am still not sure how it happened. The team just clicked. The job went from one of stress and dreading work to one I enjoyed. And not just me. Much of the team, in fact. It’s like that team thing: “forming, norming, storming…” Not only did we norm somewhere in that time, but we were now storming. The “culture” of the team had coalesced into a close-knit group. People laugh, have fun, joke around with each other, enjoy each other’s company more akin to friends than colleagues, and above all else, are EXCITED at what they are doing. Since that change, our team proactively took on efforts. They think outside the box, going above and beyond and they are passionate! That’s the word I use, passion, and I love being around such people; it makes life exciting. This positive culture we’d created together even changed the outside perspective of our team. New RSE applicants are storming the door now! They want to be part of this thing we created. We had created an environment that nurtured innovation and entrepreneurship, allowing individuals to make their mark on the world in an environment people wanted to be part of. The Image and Spatial Data Analysis team receiving the NCSA Director’s Excellence award for outstanding achievements alongside the Blue Waters team. The Brown Dog team at NSF for its 18-month review. I can’t point to any one specific thing that got us here, but I can say it was a group effort to bring everyone together. Jong Lee, Rob Kooper, Luigi Marini and many others were part of creating this. So, back to the original question, here is a cool fact about my job. My job isn’t cool because I’m in charge. What is cool is that for the last four or so years, my job, one that I passionately devote myself to, is maintaining this community we have created. What project(s) are you working on right now? Kenton testing out our new teleimmersive robot with Liana. Kenton, Luigi, Rob at Supercomputing. Projects come and go, they are finite. I always encourage my team to understand that. We instead work on endeavors that possibly last our careers. The projects we work on ideally align with accomplishing our endeavors. I have a few such endeavors. I would love for one to land before I die 🙂 . The first has evolved over the years around the role we play within science today, what we refer to today as Research Software Engineers (RSEs). I have spent my career fighting towards improving the stature of our role, providing a career path, greater job stability, and improving hiring practices and status within academia. I don’t ever want my team or their work to feel like a disposable aspect of a project that goes away once the job is done. My dream is for academia to get to a point where the long-term value and irreplaceable institutional knowledge of RSEs is finally realized by all, where RSEs are on par with faculty, and for an RSE to have the option of tenure. Kenton handing out Clowder cats at the first Clowder All Paws workshop. Related to that, and given the importance of software within research today, my second endeavor has been around changing the face of publication itself. Static PDF papers are no longer adequate given the magnitude of software involved in research or the software needed for reproducibility and to build off of published work. Just like the transformation the publishing community went through when they went from physical paper submissions to XML, postscript and PDF digital submissions, it’s time again to change the methodology of publishing. A new idea I started advocating for within the NSF Earthcube program is a good example of the type of change I propose – submitting scientific notebooks, not as a supplement to a paper, but as the paper itself. We had the crazy idea of doing a Call for Notebooks as a peer-reviewed submission, incentivizing the community to package and submit their software to us. If accepted and properly cited, software developers could put these publications on their CVs. We’d no longer have to beg and pull teeth to capture this work and get this kind of recognition for our work if our model was accepted. I’m happy to say that the community embraced it. From there Sloan funded AGU/Wiley to pilot out the logistics and tools needed to do this on a wider scale. I have others as well. 🙂 What inspires you? Trying out the new proton pack. I grew up in challenging circumstances as a poor Hispanic boy in California, where prospects for people like me were often bleak. The idea of simply living, dying and being forgotten has always terrified me – it’s a fear that still haunts me. That fear drives my determination to matter, to leave a positive mark. It’s this drive that inspires me to help others, to create positive change and to encourage people to become the best versions of themselves. What might people find you doing outside of work? I am always doing something – I just can’t sit still. As such I have way too many “hobbies.” I garden, I tinker with electronics, I repair all the stuff my family breaks (seemingly weekly), I 3D print, I learned to do 3D modeling so I can print parts for stuff and fix things I never could have fixed before, I fish, I have aquariums, I have my indoor plant collection including a bunch of carnivorous plants, I fly RC planes/drones, I collect action figures and 80s toys, I collect costumes and masks (I just bought a proton pack), I play video games, balloon animals (it’s a legit artform called “twisting”), I collect old books, I collect old stuff in general (I think they are antiques), I have started seriously cooking. I like making my family laugh. So during the nice time of year at least you’ll likely see me outside in the garden or playing with the kiddos. Kenton gloating after he won first place, posing holding a gift from his competitor/father-in-law. Tell us about a unique talent that you have. I’m often told I have a knack for channeling characters like Ted Lasso, Michael Scott from The Office, or characters from The Big Bang Theory. It’s not something I do intentionally, but colleagues often point out the similarities in my approach to work and interactions. I finally went ahead and watched Ted Lasso, so I think it reflects my ability to bring humor, optimism and a bit of quirkiness to any situation! I haven’t watched The Office though. I have watched The Big Bang Theory though, so I do wonder what those comparisons are trying to say. 🙂 Grew a heaping bunch of turnips!! What’s the best advice you’ve ever received? It wasn’t directed at me, but I was present to hear it from a previous deputy director, Danny Powel. Folks had a spectrum of thoughts in regard to Danny. Frankly, at first, I found him scary :). For some reason he took Jong and I under his wing though and to this day I consider him one of the wisest most capable people I have ever met. A new NCSA director had just started and Danny and I were helping fill some gaps as the organization went through a new “forming” stage. He was serving as the point of a new project and things were coming together very quickly and of course, some stuff was falling off the plate, too. The collaborators on the project pointed something out that was needed. It somehow needed Danny and our new director to complete it and the collaborators felt it should have been finished. I will never forget what Danny said to explain the delay, “I am learning a new boss.” I couldn’t believe this big scary man, someone who always seemed to have so much power in the org, said this so humble, so very accurate thing. Everyone is different, and in his role as deputy, supporting the director, the command Riker to his Picard, it was his job to adapt. I live by those words, not just with bosses, but with everyone. He was so valued that folks tried to stop him from retiring. They succeeded in delaying it, but he eventually moved to Texas to be with family and raise goats. Me and my son looking all tough as we prepare for the McKinnley Presbyterian church annual chili cook-off. What made you get into HPC as a career? Always loved technology, always loved science. Didn’t plan on getting into HPC per se, but married a local and when I graduated, NCSA was there. I do consider it an ideal place for me though. I have always enjoyed the more applied side of computer science but wasn’t really interested in a position in industry. NCSA allowed me to do both, develop software and be part of scientific research. Tell us something about your background that people might not know. My father was 50 when I was born, a WWII veteran. The McHenry family traces its lineage back to the revolutionary war, I could join the Sons of the American Revolution if I wanted to, I’m told. My mother is from Guatemala. The never-sitting-still trait definitely comes from her. My middle name, Guadron, was her maiden name. My son, my clone. My daughter, who complements me by being great at all the things I’m not.