Nick Weber is the cloud services program manager for the NIH Center for Information Technology (CIT). He’s been working in cloud services with NIH for 12 years with his focus the past few years being on the NIH Science and Technology Research Infrastructure for Discovery, Experimentation, and Sustainability (STRIDES) Initiative. Over the summer, his team hosted two Coding it Forward Civic Digital Fellows.
“I love their energy,” he said. Weber has mentored many students during his NIH career and worked with two Civic Digital Fellows last year by circumstance. The experience was so positive, he and his co-mentor, Joel Peterson, decided to take on two fellows, Annie Wang and Bob Zhao, again this year.
“If the question comes up again, we would take two fellows next year based on the continued positive experience,” Weber said.
Wang and Zhao spent the summer working collaboratively to improve the STRIDES Initiative web presence. Zhao focused on the back-end process while Wang worked on design and user interface.
Weber was impressed by the ease of adaptation and how quickly they learned things, both in their shared project and beyond. “They could slot in multiple places on the team and be valuable contributors,” he explained.
The transition to telework during an ongoing pandemic has presented many challenges for different offices, but Weber and his team are no strangers to remote work with Peterson working permanently from Portland, Oregon.
Weber and his team were instrumental in transitioning all the summer NIH fellows to a virtual format.
“Nick was the one who pushed to bring the fellows on virtually,” said Jessica Mazerik, Ph.D., workforce programs director for the NIH Office of Data Science Strategy. “A huge part of why this cohort was able to be successful was Joel and Nick working with their teams to get solutions in place.”
Weber and Peterson worked with Mazerik, 16 fellows, and 14 mentors to come up with technology and access solutions for the students to forge ahead with their fellowships, despite the NIH campus being shut down for the summer.
When he hasn’t been going above and beyond to support others throughout a pandemic, Weber has had no problem staying busy at home while social distancing.
“I have six little ones, so we like to load them up in the RV and go camping on the weekends,” he said.
The Office of Data Science Strategy at NIH works with institutes and centers like CIT and with Coding it Forward to bring fresh perspectives to tackle computational challenges facing the biomedical research workforce each summer. ODSS will feature fellows and mentors from the 2020 cohort throughout the summer. Meet Nick's co-mentor, Joel, and his fellows, Annie and Bob.
