Rick Wagner is the Chief Technology Officer of the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), a facility based at UC San Diego.
Rick has been interested in many topics, including astrophysics, high performance computing, and cybersecurity. But, over time, he’s learned that he’s got one real passion: understanding how researchers use technology to achieve their research goals. He’s been a part of Trusted CI since 2021, when he served as a Trusted CI Fellow. We recently talked with Rick to learn more about his professional journey and work with Trusted CI’s programs.
How do you become the chief technology officer for a supercomputer center? Rick laughs and replies, “You do that by studying astrophysics and being very, very good with computers." He started by attending San Diego Mesa Community College, where he discovered an initial interest in physics. At UC San Diego, as an undergraduate, he worked with a professor who became his research advisor. From there, Rick became interested in studying turbulence in outer space. "That meant I had to do a lot of data analysis and parallel computing,” Rick explains, “I enjoyed working with the computers and those two things dovetailed.”
At the crossroads of cybersecurity and computer science
While in graduate school at UC San Diego, Rick started to work in the high performance computing clusters at SDSC. Eventually, he worked his way up and became the High Performance Computing System Manager. More and more, Rick was working closely with SDSC security engineers. While he enjoyed these interactions, he noticed that there was sometimes tension between his colleagues and the cybersecurity staff. Rick found that by bringing the security engineers into the systems management process, things got smoother, particularly by asking the security team to help manage the system configuration through the same DevOps process as the systems group.
After graduating, Rick also worked with the University of Chicago, as part of Globus, a research data management platform that connects over 150,000 users. In his new role, he helped groups develop portals. At one point, while working on building services for a federal agency, Rick saw cybersecurity professionals and research staff struggle to communicate once again. Suddenly, he had a realization. Both groups shared a common goal but viewed the project through two different lenses. “Somebody needed to be the mediator between those two groups,” Rick explains, “And that project really was what cemented my activity to be like, I know how to do this. I know how to align the cybersecurity and research needs, and communicate that in a way both groups can understand.” Rick saw a gap and realized he had the necessary skills to bridge the cybersecurity and research community.
Getting involved with Trusted CI
While at Globus, Rick started to hear about Trusted CI. Globus relied on CILogon, a service run by Jim Basney, and there were many overlaps between the communities (e.g., Trusted CI reviewed the Globus software stack).
After returning to work at UCSD, in 2020, his supervisor suggested Rick apply to the Trusted CI Fellows Program. Rick joined the 2021 cohort and quickly saw the value of working with a small, dedicated group. Rick notes that, because it was COVID times, the group grew very tight-knit and frequently met over ZOOM to talk about common interests and lessons learned. “The idea,” Rick observes, “is that [fellows] can reach out and talk to each other….[the fellowship] is a way to approach building groups of people to promote a goal, in this case, research cybersecurity.”
At the time, Rick was working on a NIH project that he brought with him from UChicago back to UCSD. As Rick worked through his project, he discovered the Trusted CI Framework, a comprehensive cybersecurity resource with templates and tools that helps organizations establish and refine their programs. “It gave me a way to communicate what the project I was working on was doing,” Rick recalls, “Where we were trying to fit around the expectations of security compliance from the federal agency.” Most importantly, Rick said, “the Trusted CI Framework enabled me to say, here is our path. It's achieving our goals, it's enabling security.”
Finding a place in a research community of experts
After Rick started participating as a Fellow, he continued to volunteer and work with the Trusted CI community. Between 2023 and 2024, he was a NSF Cybersecurity Summit Program Committee member. In that role, Rick helped to shape the NSF Cyber Security Summit’s program helping to select keynote speakers, review community proposals and make suggestions on the program flow.
He continues to be involved in the Trusted CI Fellows Program as a moderator of the yearly panel at the Summit. Rick also organizes workshops at the Summit. In one regular session, he collaborates with Mark Krenz on a combined tutorial and workshop about approaching security for Jupyter Notebooks. Rick fondly remembers the very first workshop, held at the Summit in San Diego in 2019. “The attendees were able to give us feedback,” he recalls, “Like, Hey, I'm a security engineer and users are asking for me to deploy this, and I don't understand how it works. And I'm like, oh, you're right. I could see how that's a challenge.”
Rick relishes every opportunity to gather user feedback. He loves learning more about how people work with technology and how to make the process even smoother. Every day, he’s motivated by helping people feel like they’re enjoying their interactions with software and computers. Rick has found a group of similarly excited researchers, software engineers, and cybersecurity experts at Trusted CI. Rick appreciates how Trusted CI offers webinars, tools, and resources like the Trusted CI Framework. “I think it's one of the better places to turn,” says Rick, “to stay abreast of what's going on with research cybersecurity, particularly the NSF landscape.”
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