Our Team

Dharma handles the day-to-day operations of IRIS, including human resources, financial oversight, and management of internal systems and processes. Additionally, she is part of the IRIS leadership team, helping to set strategic goals and priorities for IRIS. Growing and sustaining the IRIS membership is a key part of her portfolio, as is work with the IRIS Board of Directors.
[email protected]

Najla is a data visualization expert and applications developer. She stays in the forefront of advancing technologies and is skilled in a variety of programming platforms and languages. Her passion outside of work includes camping and hiking.
[email protected]

Kevin is member of the IRIS leadership team and oversees all aspects of the technical operations of the organization. He works closely with member universities, IRIS staff, and partner organizations like the federal government to provide accurate and meaningful products to be used by IRIS members.
[email protected]

Amy collaborates and coordinates with data curators, researchers, and analysts at federal agencies and at IRIS member institutions. Her work as a programmer on the IRIS team focuses on designing and documenting code to link restricted data sets and producing data products and analytic data sets. Additionally, she conceptualizes and designs additional metrics that can be built using IRIS and federal data.
[email protected]

Lauren promotes IRIS data use, expands membership, and manages IRIS messaging, including newsletters, social media, annual reports, and the website. She develops strategies to engage the academic community, supports current and potential members, and raises awareness of IRIS among universities.
[email protected]

Jeong-Woo writes and maintains programs linking and summarizing data and making metrics for use in client reports; extracts, transforms and loads data into IRIS data servers; cleans and tests data; and creates data summaries in response to a variety of requests.
[email protected]

Michael facilitates the completion of IRIS projects by tracking project performance, developing detailed work plans and estimates, and managing tracking systems.
[email protected]

Jim designs and maintains interactive, data-driven applications and visualizations at IRIS, with a focus on performance and scalability. He collaborates with researchers to build and validate complex analytic datasets, updates dashboards with innovative micro-visualizations, and contributes to the ongoing development of the IRIS member portal.
[email protected]

Hoda is a postdoctoral research fellow developing machine learning models to identify emerging and hard-to-detect research communities across rapidly evolving areas of science and technology. She collaborates closely with IRIS’s technical team to build shared data infrastructure that supports robust, technology-agnostic innovation measurement across multiple research initiatives.
[email protected]

Joseph writes and maintains programs linking and summarizing data and making metrics for use in client reports; extracts, transforms and loads data into IRIS data servers; cleans and tests data; and creates data summaries in response to a variety of requests.
[email protected]

Kat contributes to IRIS’s scientific leadership and helps direct research and technical work across the Institute’s portfolio. She works closely with Jason Owen-Smith and a national network of collaborators to develop and expand the Industries of Ideas (IofI) project, leading work on data development, research design, and stakeholder engagement. Her work includes coordinating with partners across universities, government, and industry, and contributing to research analysis, publications, and new project development.
[email protected] 

Shadi cleans, links and disambiguates the IRIS UMETRICS dataset, which is released to research users as part of the IRIS Research Support Team. She also assists researchers that use the IRIS UMETRICS dataset by answering questions regarding the dataset, aggregates and de-identifies the data for research purposes, and debugs coding issues.​
[email protected]

Durosham supports the preparation and management of the IRIS UMETRICS dataset, which is released biannually and accessed by researchers across the country. As part of the IRIS Research Support Team, she is responsible for data development, analysis, and visualization; and the support of internal and external researchers working with IRIS UMETRICS data. [email protected]

Matt is a senior data scientist working with large-scale data for causal and policy analysis. He creates and manages complex data architectures from large-scale restricted and public sources to support INK/IRIS research projects and contribute to IRIS production work.
[email protected]

Meg provides logistical support for IRIS, managing calendars and scheduling along with meeting coordination and support. Her portfolio includes office management and general administrative oversight, as well as event management. Meg’s extensive background in university administration is eminently useful.
[email protected]

Karen provides pre and post-award grant administration, budget management and reporting, and print and digital publicity material design and production.  She can help with IRIS memberships and member invoicing, contracts, and assorted financial matters.  Karen is passionate about local Habitat for Humanity work and enjoys hiking, gardening and singing with the UM Choral Union.
[email protected]

Brad Youles leads the IRIS Research Data Integration team. He oversees IRIS’s data linkage, documentation, and governance efforts, guiding integration strategies that ensure high-quality, research-ready datasets. With a background in data science and technical leadership, Brad manages a team focused on data linking and access to the IRIS UMETRICS dataset through IRIS’s secure virtual enclave.
[email protected]