March 2021: REED+ Purdue's Evolution From a CUI Environment to an Ecosystem to a Community

Purdue has made giant leaps in the growth of their Regulated Research Program (REED+) in the past several years. Quite possibility the most bold, was the transition from a widely described NIST 800-171 AWS-GovCloud environment to an On-Prem HPC cluster. We’ll share what lead to this noteworthy redesign, and what lessons have been learned in the year since this transition.

The REED+ framework integrates NIST SP 800-171 and other related NIST publications as the foundation of the framework. This framework serves as a standard for campus IT to align with security regulations and best practices, and create a single process for intake, contracting, and facilitate easy mapping of controlled research to CI resources for the sponsored programs office, human subjects office, and export control office. The framework allows researchers to experience faster intake of new funded projects and be more competitive for research dollars. We’ll share our best practices and processes.

Looking beyond a single institution, Purdue REED+ has been leading a facilitated regulated research series of six small workshops. These have gathered expertise from around the country to discuss the challenges and successes within their Institution’s regulated research program. We’ll share how we’ve structured these workshops that are bringing together experience that largely still exists hidden at the institution.

Note: This presentation is a return visit for the REED+ team. Their 2019 presentation is available on YouTube.

Speaker Bios:
Carolyn Ellis is a Program Manager at Purdue University focusing in strengthening their Regulated Research Program. Over the last four years she grown the program from a single project to a thriving ecosystem handling various regulations such as HIPAA and NIST 800-171. Carolyn is passionate about efforts growing future leaders within CUI Community Development, and mentoring with both EDUCAUSE Women in IT and  WiCys (Women in Cybersecurity).

Dr. Baijian “Justin” Yang is currently an Associate Professor at the Department of Computer and Information Technology, Purdue University, West Lafayette. He served as a steering member of IEEE Cybersecurity Initiative from 2015 to 2017 and was a board director ATMAE from 2014-2016. His research interests include applied machine learning, big data and cybersecurity. He also holds several industry certifications, such as CISSP, MCSE, and Six Sigma Black Belt.

Preston Smith is the Executive Director of Research Computing at Purdue University. Supporting over 180 HPC faculty, and 550 labs using research data systems, Purdue's Community Cluster program is a pioneering program for delivering "condo-style" HPC. At Purdue, his organization designs, builds, and operates compute systems, and delivers advanced research support to the campus community.