About

Mike Renfro, PhD: Director

Mike has been at Tennessee Tech as a student, instructor, and/or staff member since 1989. Before joining ITS and deploying the first campus-wide high performance computing cluster in 2017, he spent 17 years as a research and development engineer in the Center for Manufacturing Research, developing expertise and training students in areas including mechanical design, finite element modeling, programming, data acquisition, mechanical and thermal properties testing, and research computing at smaller scales.

He has held leadership roles in multiple national RCD associations, including Campus Champions, Campus Research Computing Consortium, and is a co-founder of the Tennessee Higher Education RCD group. He is a certified instructor for The Carpentries, a global organization that teaches foundational coding and data science skills to researchers worldwide.

Sharon Colson: Research Technology Engineer

Sharon started as a student RCD facilitator in 2023 and was promoted to Research Technology Engineer after graduating in 2025, where she has primary responsibility for onboarding and facilitation activities. She has a BS degree in Computer Science, with a concentration in data science and artificial intelligence, and dual minors in chemistry and humanities. In 2024, she was selected for an exclusive internship program with the NSF ACCESS STEP program, supporting the AtlanticWave Software-Defined Exchange project.

She is a member of Campus Champions, the Association for Computing Machinery, and is a certified instructor for The Carpentries, a global organization that teaches foundational coding and data science skills to researchers worldwide.

Jim Moroney: Research Technology Engineer

Jim started as an Research Technology Engineer in April of 2026. Prior to his employment at Tech, he worked for Dr. Renfro as a student RCD facilitator through a grad assistantship before leaving for Oak Ridge National Lab - where he worked as a High Performance Scalable Systems Engineer for the National Center for Computational Sciences, administrating systems such as Summit (pictured) and Frontier. Jim holds a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science with a focus in High Performance Computing and a minor in Mathematics from Tennessee Tech, and will someday complete the one class needed to finally finish his Master's degree.

Jim is passionate about HPC outreach, and hopes to elevate awareness, usage, and knowledge of Tennessee Tech's compute resources in his role as RCD Facilitator. Outside of Tech, Jim works to preserve computing history by collecting and restoring vintage computers, and is responsible for a section of Summit being available for viewing at Mimms Museum of Technology and Art.

Trevor Clark: Student RCD Facilitator

Trevor started in April 2025 and is a third-year undergraduate majoring in Computer Science with a concentration in high performance computing. He has worked in IT support in the commercial sector, and has also assisted with high performance computing research experiences for Tennessee high school students as part of Tech's Governor's School for Emerging Technologies.