Yunliang Yu -- Programming Help for Scholars
Presidential Award honors work that has is being used by scholars across Duke and the world
Monday, April 16, 2007
print
|
email
|
digg
|
del.icio.us
Durham, NC -- Yunliang Yu sees himself as a technology enabler. Yu, senior systems programmer in the Duke Department of Mathematics, sets a goal of working on projects that go beyond the scope of his department and that can be extended to the entire university.
“The environment here is really rewarding and challenging,” said Yu, a recent recipient of the Presidential Award in the managerial category. “If we can enable faculty to achieve things previously impossible or make them more efficient and productive, we feel great in doing a good job. The faculty appreciate what we’ve done, and we are making a difference in our department and across the university.”
The best example of Yu's contributions to the Duke community is the Faculty Database System, which was originally created for the mathematics department and has grown into an enterprise system used by more than 5,000 faculty members across the university. It saves faculty time and effort in publicizing their research results, managing their websites and streamlining the annual reporting/evaluation processes.
He developed mathjobs.org, a Web-based job application service, that saved the math department hundreds of hours in processing job applications. Mathjobs manages the hiring process from initial application through letters of reference to the discussion and decision stages. It's widely used by mathematics departments in North America, and it has fundamentally changed the hiring process in the mathematics community.
ManagerialPresidential Award Yunliang Yu, math Presidential Meritorious Award Jennifer Gordon, facilities management – ground services Yvette McMiller, LATCH program, community health Patrick McConnell, bioinformatics, Duke Cancer Center Antoinette Parker, hospital communications Susan Kauffman, public affairs and government relations |
Last year he made the service available to other Duke departments by creating academicjobsonline.org, which has been used by the English, biology, economics and the physics departments.
“Dr. Yu provides fantastic support for the mathematics department,” said Mark Stern, chair of the mathematics department. ”He shows excellent initiative, anticipating our needs and constantly finding ways to improve our computing services. He is friendly, dedicated and a pleasure to work with.”
Yu’s management style emphasizes innovation and having fun. He understands that one of the most important components to being a good manager is to get people into the creative process.
“I like to involve others in working toward a solution to a problem,” he said. “On a typical project, I would check with my colleagues and find out how they would do the project. We put ideas together. I make sure that they know their input is important.”
Yu received his Ph.D. in mathematics from Duke in 1991. He began work in the math department right after graduation.
Making a difference is important to Yu, and he said he relishes the opportunity to dive into university IT projects, just as he looks forward to diving into the swimming pool after a long day at the office.
He relies on faculty advice to help him wrestle with IT challenges, and he said the secret of his success is support from the department.
“I happen to be the person with the IT expertise to pull it off,” he said. “With faculty participation, we can be really creative to do the best job we can.”
The Presidential Award was a complete surprise for Yu.
“No one told me anything until I got a letter,” he said. “Now the whole department knows about it. My youngest daughter said she wanted to take the medallion to school for show-and-tell in her kindergarten class.”
