Meet more staff
Current profiles: Troy Morey and William Obermeyer.
Troy Morey
Information Processing Consultant
Troy has worked full time in the Department for two years, after 4 years if part-time work for the Department’s computer help desk while he was a UW-Madison student earning his B.S. in Computer Science. Troy and two colleagues (supervisor Paul Counsell and student Eduard Rusi) make up the Department’s IT staff.
“The Department is large enough that there are plenty of interesting projects to work on in all areas [and] any project that I work on has a direct benefit to the Department. I see positive feedback quickly on my work.”
Prioritizing well is always Troy’s goal: Having a small IT staff results in “sometimes having to put projects on hold that may be equally important as others.” Troy has improved departmental server operations by developing an integrated server platform that is more convenient, less expensive, and faster. His goals are to continue to adjust to the IT needs of a growing Department, improve security, and help researchers with their unique data challenges.
William Obermeyer, PhD
Senior Scientist
Bill studies how sleep and alertness affect other areas of one’s life and supervises students as a Senior Scientist working with Ruth Benca, MD, PhD. Bill conducts basic research (research done for knowledge). “Sleep hits a sweet spot for research,” Bill says. “It’s slow, predictable, variable enough, and it’s connected to so many other things physiologically.” Bill has been in the Department for 14 years.
“People today have grown up knowing that sleep is a legitimate area of study. Yet It hasn’t been around that long,” Bill said. The addition of computer-savvy researchers who have never questioned whether sleep is a legitimate field is a positive change. “It’s a new perspective,” he said.
One of Bill’s professional goals is to “surf on the new knowledge and new perspectives” that incoming post-doc and other researchers bring to the field. “People who have grown up with [technology] have a completely different perspective about what the scientific question is to be studied. There are young scientists here who are very good at putting things together and framing the question, that makes me just say, ‘Yes! That’s exactly what the question is.’”
“I want to try to explore that new skill – that new perspective – while keeping a broader perspective that comes from experience.”