From those whose careers have just begun to seasoned veterans, we enjoyed showcasing the many different paths and roles these leaders have taken in supercomputing, and hope that they have uplifted and inspired you along the way.

Four pieces profiling nine women were published here on our blog, with the remainder across our social media platforms LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. To make sure you didn’t miss a single one, check out the full list below and be sure to read all of their stories. 

Thank you to our women in HPC and to those of you who nominated them! A list of all the people involved on this project can be found after the profiles!

Celebrating Women in HPC

Annie Ma-Weaver

Amanda Hassenplug

Michelle Spencer

Laura Morgenstern

Clare Jenner

Carole A. Morrison

Rasha Karakchi

Summer Wasson

Nidhi Chappell

Maria Patelkou

Valeria Losasso

Sarah Anne Harris

Melyssa Fratkin

Cristina Beldica

Melissa Kozul

Andrea Townsend-Nicholson

Sarah Rodenbeck

Susmita Sett

Anjana Kar

Sony Malhotra

Ruth Marinshaw

Rosalia Gomez

Agnes Noy

Emily Kahl

Sheri Voelz Michelson

Claudia Lagios

Vanessa Moss

Jannetta Steyn

Lydia Heck

Sarah Beecroft

Elisabetta Boella

Kanchan Mehrotra

Parwinder Kaur

Tania Malik

Lisa Arafune

Garima Kochhar

Kakali Sen

Teresa Schofield

Christine Cuicchi

Iva Kavčič

Acknowledgements

Cristin Merritt

To bring Women’s History Month profile series to life required more than a dozen volunteers and over 90 hours of work in writing, editing, and publishing time. This project was led by SC23 Communications Team Member Cristin Merritt. Special thanks goes out to additional SC23 Communication Team Members Christine Baissac-Hayden, Todd Szymanski, Waleed Atallah, and Charity Plata; Women in High Performance Computing (WHPC) volunteers Marion Weinzierl, Marion O’Sullivan, Aditi Subramanya, AJ Lauer, Adam Huttner-Koros, Melyssa Fratkin, Matt Probert, Rachel Pruitt, Georgina Ellis, Robin Scibek, and Katy Gunderson; and to Cristin’s local team in the UK Wil Mayers, Stuart Franks, and Daniel Shaw.

We are deeply grateful to the HPC Community for being so supportive of this project and these women, whose work is a vital part of our field. Thank you for reading every story!

Enjoy the Series

Part Four of a Four-Part Series

As we approach the end of our series on women in HPC, let us take a moment to recognize and celebrate the many women who have made significant contributions to HPC. Their achievements serve as an inspiration to the next generation of women in computing, and remind us of the important role that women have played and continue to play in the development of technology. In this piece our leaders talk about unlocking potential in their work. Through standing in representation in their stories we very much hope that other readers will see they too have the potential to make a difference.

Please read on to hear from our final featured female leaders in our blog series – and don’t forget – we have over thirty-one profiles of women in HPC being published across our social media sites. Be sure to follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram to see all the profiles and thank you for reading about all these incredible women.

HPC Unlocks a More Sustainable Future

My first taste of high-performance computing (HPC) was during my PhD where I undertook a small computational mini-project to complement my experimental work. While the supercomputer I used at the time was probably less powerful, computationally, in comparison to my current mobile phone, I loved the way that computational chemistry could be used to predict chemical properties and reactions. What started out as a mini-project led me to a postdoc position that involved only computational work and now, 20 years later, I have established and now lead my own research group in this area.

Professor michelle Spencer, BSc (hons.), PhD, FRACI

Deputy Director, Centre for Digital Innovation STEM, RMIT University

Michelle on Linkedin

My research team specializes in computational materials chemistry. We work to model reactions at the molecular scale to predict properties of materials that haven’t been synthesized outside of the computer yet or can be time consuming to characterize and make experimentally. Our goal is to find new materials that can be used to advance our technological capabilities while being sustainable. More specifically, the findings from my group’s work is helping to develop materials that can be used to reduce the size of common electronic devices, provide better renewable energy storage solutions (such as batteries and fuel cells), detect pollutants in our environment and create new manufacturing opportunities. The calculations needed to do this are very computationally demanding, so much so that we use two of Australia’s leading supercomputing facilities, Pawsey and NCI, for our work. If we were to use standard desktop machines for the same job, I would be long retired by the time we calculated anything useful.

The HPC research field, like many areas of science and engineering, has traditionally had low female representation. When I did my degree at university there were no female lecturers in chemistry or female professors who were active in research. This made me wonder if this was a field that would be welcoming to me even though I really wanted to work in it. For me, it is important to have a greater representation of women in this field as they act as role models for future scientists. Who knows how many great potential scientists we have lost and continue to lose from HPC because they didn’t see a place for themselves in the field, and so moved to other areas. That’s why it is important to be visible.

Personal Twitter: @Prof_MSpencer

Research Group Twitter: @MSpencerGroup

Google Scholar

HPC Is a Perfect Fit for Me

In 2012, I was awarded a highly competitive and prestigious Irish Research Council – IRC postgraduate scholarship to pursue a PhD at University College Dublin, Ireland. This marked the beginning of my journey in the field of High-Performance Computing (HPC). I was fascinated by the idea of using HPC hybrid and heterogeneous computing platforms to solve complex problems and the potential of HPC to revolutionize the way we approach computing. I felt like I had found the perfect fit for myself. Every day was a new day with new challenges. I quickly developed a passion for the field and have since worked on a variety of projects related to HPC. My work focuses on the performance and energy optimization of data-intensive parallel applications on heterogeneous high-performance computing (HPC) platforms.

Dr. Tania Malik, PHD

Assistant Lecturer in Computing, Technological University Dublin (TU Dublin)

Tania on LinkedIn

My professional career is a good mix of teaching, research and development and industry experience. I have had the opportunity to work in leading Irish and international higher education institutions including UCD, DCU, NCI Dublin, COMSATS and NUST Pakistan. I am also active in industry collaborations and have worked with leading tech partners such as Fidelity, IBM, Whizz systems USA, PSEB and PYB. As a passionate academic, I believe in knowledge transfer as it gives me a sense of purpose and helps to grow. I strongly believe that teaching is the foundation of all other professions. I love to introduce my students to the latest concepts and developments in the HPC field. I also work to ensure that students are well-prepared to enter the workforce and are able to apply their knowledge to real-world problems.

I was the only female in my research group during my PhD as well as in postdoc. As a woman of color with an accent, I have experienced firsthand the lack of representation of women and other underrepresented groups in the high-performance computing field. This has led me to become a strong advocate for good representation, as gender and racial diversity are hugely beneficial in academics. Women scientists and engineers face numerous challenges, but these can also be seen as opportunities. Even if you are in the minority, my advice is, don’t be disheartened because it means there is not enough of “you” in that field. Find organizations and clubs that support your identity. There are more opportunities now than ever before, so make sure you take full advantage of the education that is available and you could be a role model for the next generation.

Personal Twitter: @malik_tania

Research Group

Google Scholar

Exploring the Origins of Life

Ever since I could remember I was fascinated by how and where life started. How did all the biodiversity and species around us evolve? How and why do we exist? So, when I learned about DNA and RNA and the field of biology, I was hooked.  Initially, I started out working on a lab bench, but then in 2011 I started my postdoctoral research journey looking at methane emissions from agriculture in Australia and how they impact the environment. At the time 40% of the emissions came from agriculture, a major portion of these from livestock. As the project dug deeper we discovered that animal feed plays a key role… and presented a key problem.  Is it genetics? The digestion of the food? The bug in the stomach of cows or sheep? The feed itself? Well “you are what you eat” held true in this context also and I followed on the feed component, which took us right to the source of the problem through the lens of – the DNA.

Dr. Parwinder Kaur

Associate Professor and Director, DNA Zoo Australia, The University of Western Australia

Parwinder on LinkedIn

At the time there was another research group in Japan who happened to be looking at the similar species of legume plants, so I set off to work with them but it turned out that our fields weren’t as closely related as I thought. I was stuck with a choice: learn a new language and a new field, or, learn the language of supercomputing. I realized that HPC would allow me to expand beyond my field and that of my collaborators in Japan – so I choose supercomputing. I began with coding in Perl while I was pregnant and found I not only enjoyed it, but I had a talent for it. In 2013 I won the prestigious Science and Innovation Award for young people in Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry by Australian Academy of Sciences and I was off in HPC and never looked back.

Today, I’m working on building foundational genomic resources for species and ecosystem conservation through capturing as much information as possible about the species at risk. There are over one million species currently at the risk of extinction. Each individual can generate hundreds of terabytes of data, for example, the koala alone has so far required trillions of pass throughs in order to establish the DNA of a single species. Regardless of the amount of work needed the more we understand about these species the more we can do to help them, and our entire planet, survive.

Personal Twitter: @Dr_Parwinder

Superstar of STEM

Google Scholar

A Continuing Series

Part Three of a Four-Part Series

Women have been instrumental in the development of programming languages, algorithms, and computer systems that have revolutionized the world as we know it. The role of the RSE takes these capabilities to the next level, as oftentimes being able to write better code, guarantee that software has received proper quality assurance, and that it is maintained long-term in HPC means getting more in-depth with the actual research. This week we celebrate two women who have welcomed the challenges and opportunities supercomputing provides them in building towards sustainable scientific software for climate research and computational chemistry.

Please read on to learn more about these two fantastic female leaders here in our blog series – but our highlights do not stop here! Be sure to follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram to see all the profiles as they unfold over the month of March.

Accelerating Code & Discovery

Growing up I never pictured myself as a software engineer and especially not working in the field of High Performance Computing. But then, in college, I was required to take a computer science course. It was in that class that I saw for the first time I could be a part of this field. I really enjoyed the way software engineering challenged me to think of problems in different ways and I was attracted to software engineering’s ability to help in many fields. A couple of years after taking that first class I started a software engineering internship at Argonne National Laboratory where I found my career as a Research Software Engineer in HPC, a career I still enjoy to this day.

Sheri Voelz Mickelson

Software Engineer III and Manager at NCAR

Sheri on Linkedin

Currently, I work for the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) as a Research Software Engineer and, along with the team I manage, we work on accelerating weather and climate codes and their I/O workflows to run efficiently on modern and future HPC systems. Thanks to years of experience, I get to use my skills to make an impact within the field of climate and weather research. By accelerating their codes, I accelerate the scientists’ time to discovery. This allows them to explore new areas of science where it wasn’t possible before. What motivates me the most is hearing the excitement in a scientist’s voice telling me about the new areas they can research because of my work.

One thing I’m passionate about is mentoring, especially younger individuals from underrepresented groups. I want to get more diversity into HPC, and having more diverse individuals who are visible in our field is very important. After all, if you don’t see people like you within that profession, it’s hard to imagine yourself in that profession. In my mentoring work I let mentees guide the process as trust is very important. They know my door is always open even when the formal mentoring relationship has ended. Achieving true diversity, equity, and inclusion within our field is a large and challenging task, but if we each do our own part, those smaller individual differences that are made can lead to larger changes collectively.

Writing Satisfying Scientific Code

I got into scientific application development during my PhD in atomic physics, where most of the problems I was interested in require large-scale numerical simulations to be tractable. When my computational needs started to outstrip the capacities of our in-house code, I decided the fastest way to get the features I needed was to write it myself. Writing high-performance scientific code is deeply satisfying to me, and once I saw just how big of an impact my development efforts had in supporting my colleagues’ research I knew that scientific application development was what I wanted to do with my career.

Dr. Emily Kahl

Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (AIBN), The University of Queensland

Emily on LinkedIn

Today, I work as a Research Software Engineer at the Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (AIBN) focused on implementing new methods in molecular dynamics. Our goal is to make our methods more widely available for researchers. Historically, molecular dynamics is a standard “workhorse” method in computational chemistry and materials science, and the largest public codes are used by thousands of researchers worldwide. This means getting our cutting-edge methods included in those codebases has the potential to make them much more widely available than writing our own code from scratch. And from the perspective of our own research, we study some pretty chunky systems so we need to design our codes with performance and scalability as a first-class concern – we need to spend a lot of time thinking about how to design for modern, heterogeneous HPC architectures.

I believe it is morally right to promote the representation of women and underrepresented groups in HPC. Beyond that, when we remove arbitrary barriers like sexism, racism or transphobia that prevent people from contributing to science based on arbitrary factors, then we all benefit from their contributions. I’ve seen too many brilliant people pushed out of science (and computing in particular) because of their gender or race and, in addition to being morally bad, it’s also to the detriment of the HPC community.  Everyone should take ownership of improving diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI)– not just consider it a box-ticking exercise. And while there isn’t one right way or easy answer, the pursuit of DEI has to be something that’s honestly supported by people with institutional capital at all levels of an organization.

A Continuing Series

Part Two of a Four-Part Series

Today, women continue to make groundbreaking contributions to HPC, from developing cutting-edge software and hardware to leading research teams and advancing the field as a whole. These women have overcome obstacles and challenges to make their mark in a field and are happy to share their stories to help inspire those seeking a career in supercomputing. This week, we celebrate two women who have harnessed the power of HPC to revolutionize the fields of green energy and medicine.

Please read on to learn more about these two fantastic female leaders here in our blog series, but the highlights do not stop here! Be sure to follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram to see all 31 of our profiles as they unfold over the month of March.

Unshakable Belief in HPC’s Potential

Having attended a girls-only high school I was never exposed to programming. There probably wasn’t that much interest so naturally they didn’t think to offer a course. So when I entered into my engineering studies to pursue green energy technology I found myself surrounded by boys who seemed to have a lot of experience with computers, which initially freaked me out. However, the fact was that my desire to work in engineering and contribute to tomorrow’s green energy trumped any fear I had, so I stuck with it!

Dr. Melissa Kozul

Research Fellow in Extreme-Scale CFD, University of Melbourne

Melissa on Linkedin

Over time I have developed an unshakable belief that using computers is the key to solving the energy problems of the future. Yet I had to get over my ‘imposter syndrome’ around believing I somehow wasn’t up to the task of programming and realize that I had much to contribute. Doing this has allowed me to push myself and the software and hardware I use to the cutting edge. I conduct some of the biggest fluid dynamics simulations in the world, which are transitioning from the Summit to the Frontier cluster over 2023. These simulations are highly detailed and can’t be run on anything other than a leadership-scale supercomputer. Recently, after almost 10 years working on such machines, I finally got to see one in person. I found it inspiring to learn more about all the components and systems that make up a supercomputer. The experience left me feeling more excited than ever about their potential to help solve some of society’s greatest challenges.

It’s important for anyone interested in this field to stay the course and know that everything you need to know is out there for you to learn. HPC is accessible and computing centers provide all the support needed irrespective of prior exposure to programming. I wouldn’t want any young people out there to have false beliefs about who is ‘good at this stuff’. The truth is, every motivated person can be and there are many important problems to solve!

I Had to Wait for HPC to Catch Up

If there is one thing my work on Virtual Humans at CompBioMed has taught me, it is that people are just as impatient as I am. I look forward to the time when we can utilize a digital twin of ourselves to help diagnose and treat our own illnesses with vastly reduced risk of side effects. My own work in HPC has been a long time coming. In fact, it’s been almost twenty years. I realized when I started out in biochemistry and molecular biology that computational modeling would be the future, and today we’re finally beginning to see what HPC can do in this space. The wait has been completely worthwhile. However, as I see HPC’s convergence into biology stirring up new questions–from ethics and how to handle data to how you communicate your findings and its society impact. Sure, it does mean that there are more problems we need to solve, but I like to think these are opportunities to stretch beyond our current capabilities and bring more people into the fields of health and medicine.

Andrea Townsend-Nicholson

Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, UCL and CompBioMed

Andrea on LinkedIn

For my field, this is an opportunity to take a lot of the diversity we have cultivated in our field and cross it over into computational sciences. With HPC now firmly in our capabilities I’ve been able to take my knowledge to biology students and cross-pollinate them into researchers and medical students who are coming out with degrees that integrate medicine and biology with digital skills and HPC! When I started teaching students to use HPC at UCL there were over 50% of female graduating from a biological sciences degree in the UK in comparison to the 17% graduating from Computer Sciences. Not to mention in biology you often need to be in a lab, but with computational work you can be anywhere. This opens up really flexible job opportunities – and more opportunities for diversity.

I’m proud to be opening up new opportunities in HPC. I firmly believe that when people see the diversity of jobs and people, they feel much more comfortable joining in.

A Continuing Series

Part One of a Four-Part Series

Diversity drives innovation. With so many complex problems to solve, the field of HPC is well positioned to speed results in areas such as chemistry, physics, sociology and much more. Compute power aside, all of what we achieve in HPC is made possible by the talents of many. In celebration of Women’s History Month we are placing the focus on the female leaders, researchers, managers, scholars, and the many roles they have undertaken to make supercomputing solutions possible.

We are delighted to feature two of our female leaders here in the first part of our blog series – but our highlights do not stop there! Be sure to follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram to see all thirty-one of our profiles as they unfold over the month of March.

I Kept on Running Into HPC

I was developing solutions in vertical partnerships across financial services, health care, and manufacturing and with each one I kept running into HPC. As I dug further, I learned how HPC is incredibly important for our business and, even more pressing, an integral means of doing more and better science and engineering. I’m in my seventh year of working on HPC for Google Cloud and remain excited about how we can contribute to the HPC community. One of my proudest accomplishments is launching our partnership with SchedMD, which helped produce our cutting-edge Slurm on Google Cloud solution, which makes HPC more accessible to all.

Annie Ma-weaver

Tech/ISV HPC Partnerships Lead for Google Cloud

Annie on Linkedin

When I think of how we can bring more diversity into HPC, I think of two things. First, accessibility. To become more accessible means welcoming more diversity. Being a woman, a person of color and an immigrant in HPC gives me the privilege of being a role model and mentor, as well as the power to identify and champion the change that brings more folks into the fold. And second, mentorship. I’m an active part of our Google DEI initiatives and mentor underrepresented groups, including women. I’m also a member of the Columbia College Women group and have had the honor of being a mentor to multiple undergraduates.

Diversity helps improve the quality of our collaborations in HPC and I want to increase it however I can.

My Path to HPC Was Not a Straight Road

I was destined to be engaged in IT, one way or another! Growing up my Mom went to school for IT, and even though my educational path was Psychology, the time I helped her to study filtered through and when I graduated I ended up with a degree from Purdue studying Psychology, Organizational Leadership and Supervision and… a minor in Computer Programming Technology. My initial career field was Human Resources (HR), where I developed a specialisation for HR in IT, including HPC and Research Computing. In the last few months I’ve made the transition fully into the HPC field, serving as a Senior Research Operations Administrator, or more commonly thought of a Project Manager for Research Computing, specifically for the NSF funded Anvil project.

Amanda Hassenplug

Senior Research Operations Administrator, Purdue University

Amanda at Purdue

My work focuses on managing the many intricacies of the Anvil project and helping the PI/Co-PI’s implement their vision for the project and associated programming come to fruition. Part of the programming that I am currently focused on is building up a pipeline of future HPC professionals. Anvil has an REU (Research Experience for Undergraduates) program that has just entered its second year, so I’ve spent a lot of time building up the framework to support growth. We want to be sure there is a lot of opportunity to bring in diversity: diversity of undergraduate programs, diversity of universities, and diversity of the candidates themselves. Providing opportunities for students to gain experience and exposure to HPC, especially for undergrads, and looking to the future for those that choose the HCP field as a profession is important to the project and to me personally.

In order for HPC to continue to grow and flourish we need to have a variety of viewpoints, backgrounds, and experiences represented. Having a more consistent representation of the nation as a whole in HPC is paramount to the growth of the field and the effectiveness of ongoing innovations. Without this representation we run the risk of missing the mark of where HPC could and should go, or making errors of omission in how we get there, limiting the effectiveness and possibility for this field.

A Continuing Series