Presenters

Prof. Dr. Doris Agotai has been the Director of the FHNW School of Computer Science since January 2025. The FHNW School of Computer Science harnesses the transformative power of computer science to shape a meaningful and sustainable future. It offers degree programmes and research opportunities in computer science, data science, and artificial intelligence. In addition, it also promotes lifelong learning, and supports technology transfer between the university and industry.After completing her studies and doctorate at ETH Zurich, Doris Agotai has been teaching and researching at the FHNW since 2007. She founded the Institute for Interactive Technologies in 2018 and has been head of the research & services department since 2021, which promotes exchange between teaching, research, and industry.

Kate Arneson is a research user interface and experience (UIX) designer at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her work focuses on applying human-centered design to research software projects, with applications ranging from chemistry and machine learning to genomics and healthcare. At NCSA and the Molecule Maker Lab Institute, Kate collaborates closely with scientists, engineers, and end-users to create usable, reproducible, and sustainable applications, advancing the role of design in interdisciplinary research.

Neil Ashton is a Distinguished Engineer at NVIDIA, with a specific focus on Computer-Aided Engineering (CAE). In this role he helps to guide the development of NVIDIA products and drive adoption of NVIDIA’s platform among CAE partners and practitioners. Prior to NVIDIA, he was the WW Tech Lead for CAE at Amazon Web Services. Previous to these positions he was a Senior Researcher within the Department of Engineering Science at the University of Oxford developing novel high-fidelity CFD methods. Dr. Ashton also worked in Formula 1 with the Lotus F1 team (now Alpine F1) and worked with Formula 1 Management and the FIA on the 2022 technical regulation changes. He is a Fellow of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers who has published more than 50 papers, and is an active contributor/leader in international workshops such as the AIAA High-Lift Prediction Workshop and Automotive CFD Prediction workshop series, which he created in 2019. He’s also passionate about explaining science and engineering to the general public and also hosts a podcast interviewing some of the luminary engineers and scientists in the fields of CAE, HPC and ML. Neil earned his MEng and Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Manchester, UK.

Paola Cinnella is Professor of Fluid Mechanics at the Jean Le Rond d’Alembert Institute, Sorbonne University. Her research focuses on Computational Fluid Dynamics, including discretization methods, optimization, uncertainty quantification, and scientific machine learning for turbulent flows in aerospace and energy. She is Editor-in-Chief of Computers & Fluids, Associate Editor of International Journal of Heat, and serves on several editorial boards. She also coordinates the “Machine Learning in Fluid Dynamics” group of ERCOFTAC, the European research community in Flow, Turbulence, and Combustion.

Florina Ciorba is an Associate Professor and head of the High Performance Computing (HPC) Lab at the University of Basel, Switzerland, which she established in 2015. She earned her Ph.D. from the National Technical University of Athens in 2008, followed by postdoctoral positions at Mississippi State University, USA, and the Technical University of Dresden, Germany.Prof. Ciorba’s research encompasses methods, tools, and techniques for enhancing performance, portability, resilience, reproducibility, security, sustainability, and autonomous operation of systems and HPC and AI/ML applications. She has authored nearly a hundred peer-reviewed publications and received best paper awards at several conferences. Her recent work focuses on autotuning with scheduling and load balancing libraries, energy-efficient cosmological simulations at extreme scales, and developing autonomy loops for observability and system performance.Prof. Ciorba is a founding board member and principal investigator of the University of Basel node for the SKACH project, part of the Swiss Consortium of the SKAO, and a founding member of the IDEAS4HPC Association—a Swiss chapter of Women in HPC. She holds senior and life memberships with ACM, and memberships with IEEE, IEEE Computer Society, HiPEAC, and DISCOVER-US. She contributes to various forums, committees and boards, including the Energy Efficiency HPC Working Group, SPEC High Performance Group, SciCORE User Board at University of Basel, and DCSR Scientific Advisory Board at University of Lausanne. Over the past decade, Prof. Ciorba has held numerous leadership roles in parallel computing and HPC conferences and workshops. More information is available at her lab’s website http://hpc.dmi.unibas.ch/.

Dr. Sally Ellingson, an Assistant Professor in Biomedical Informatics, works with the Cancer Research Informatics Shared Resource Facility of the University of Kentucky’s Markey Cancer Center. She is a computational scientist working at the intersection of computational biology, informatics, and high-performance computing. She has undergraduate degrees in computer science and mathematics from Florida Institute of Technology. She obtained her doctoral degree at the University of Tennessee and Oak Ridge National Laboratory under a fellowship funded by the National Science Foundation in computational biology. Dr. Ellingson engages in mentoring and outreach, especially for underrepresented groups in computational sciences.

Alberto Figueroa received his PhD in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University, where he developed fluid-structure interaction methods for blood flow analysis. He was a Senior Lecturer in the Division of Biomedical Engineering and Imaging Sciences at King’s College London. Dr. Figueroa is currently the Edward B. Diethrich M.D. Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Vascular Surgery at the University of Michigan.Dr. Figueroa’s research group develops tools for the modeling of blood flow. These tools combine imaging, machine learning, and computational methods of fluid and solid mechanics. His group develops the modeling software CRIMSON and he is also the co-founder of AngioInsight, Inc. a company which develops AI tools for assessment of coronary artery disease using x-ray angiography.

Laura Grigori is a Full Professor at EPFL and PSI and Chair of high performance Numerical algorithms and simulations. She has received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Université Henri Poincaré, France, INRIA Lorraine. After spending two years at UC Berkeley and LBNL as a postdoctoral researcher, she has joined INRIA where she has lead Alpines group from 2013 to 2023, a joint group between INRIA and J.L. Lions Laboratory, Sorbonne University, in Paris. She is a SIAM Fellow, the recipient of an ERC Synergy Grant, and of the SIAM Supercomputing Career Prize in 2024. Her field of expertise is numerical linear, multilinear algebra, and high performance scientific computing for challenging applications ranging from astrophysics to molecular simulations.

I am Director of the Advanced Research Computing Centre at University College London. UCL ARC has a hybrid mission: to provide the computing, data, software and networking infrastructure and skills that empower computational science and digital scholarship across the university and its partners, and to deliver world-leading research in digital research infrastructures and their application. Prior to rejoining UCL to lead ARC in 2021 I have held a variety of senior leadership roles in computational science, digital research, and data science.I was Director of Research Engineering at the Alan Turing Institute, the UK’s national institute for data science and artificial intelligence. I founded, grew and led a team of thirty research software engineers and data scientists contributing to a huge range of data- and compute-intensive research. The team continue to build and use tools to analyse and present large datasets, and create complex models running on state of the art supercomputers. In particular, I directed the "Tools, Practices and Systems" research programme within the UK's strategic priority research programme "AI for Science, Engineering, Health and Government".During the acute phase of the Coronavirus pandemic I was seconded from the Alan Turing Institute as Chief Data Science Advisor to the Joint Biosecruity Centre, the quantitative analysis and assessment hub of the UK Coronavirus Response. I was lead advisor on digital twins, mathematical, statistical and computational modelling, machine learning, research software engineering and trusted research environments, and worked very closely with the most senior officials.I was the Director of Digital Research Infrastructure at UK Research and Innovation, the UK's national research and innovation agency. I led on strategy for the software, supercomputers, skills, data services and clouds that underpin computational science and digital scholarship in the UK.I was founding head of UCL’s Research Software Engineering Group, now part of the new ARC department. It was the first such group in a UK university. Fields addressed included machine learning for intensive care, ancient Mesopotamian history, graph theoretical approaches to modeling chemical catalysis, computer vision for astronomy, trans-oceanic journalistic exchanges, data centric engineering, brain blood flow simulations and DNA crime scene analysis. This new model for applied computational research groups in universities, pioneered under my leadership, has now been adopted by research intensive universities across the globe.Prior to these roles, I held a number of individual contributor roles in digital research in industry and academia, including with Mathworks, the makers of Matlab, at AMEE, a climate change data science startup, and in postdoctoral roles in UCL in computational physiology. My PhD in theoretical and computational physics from Cambridge University focused on computational tools for predicting experimental signatures of supersymmetric theories.

Bronson Messer is a Distinguished Staff Scientist and the Director of Science of the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He is also a Joint Faculty Professor in the Department of Physics & Astronomy at the University of Tennessee. His primary research interests are related to the explosion mechanisms and phenomenology of supernovae, especially neutrino transport and signatures. He has also worked on machine learning applied to galaxy merger simulations and on performance modeling for HPC architectures. Messer recently served on the American Physical Society’s Committee on Informing the Public (2018-2020) and in 2020 he was awarded the Secretary of Energy’s Honor Award for his part in enabling the COVID-19 High-Performance Computing Consortium.

Elisa Molinari is Professor of Physics at Unimore and CNR-Nano in Modena, Italy, and Director of the MaX European Centre of Excellence on “Materials Design at the Exascale” (https://max-centre.eu). Her main research interests are in theoretical and computational condensed matter science. She has been particularly active in the theory of fundamental properties of low-dimensional structures, in the simulation of advanced nano-bio systems and devices, and in the advancement of related computational methods. She has led or participated in scientific boards within the European HPC ecosystem including the EuroHPC JU and major international scientific institutions. More info at https://www.nano.cnr.it/researcher-profile/elisa-molinari/

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Matej Praprotnik is Head of the Laboratory for Molecular Modeling at the National Institute of Chemistry and Professor of Physics at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, University of Ljubljana. He is a former Chair of the PRACE Scientific Steering Committee and serves as a council member of CECAM. Matej is a recipient of the ERC Advanced Grant 2019 by the European Research Council and the project coordinator of MultiXscale, a EuroHPC JU CoE. His research is focused on computer simulation of soft and biological matter. The focus is on developing and combining innovative computational and theoretical methods augmented by machine learning techniques to study complex molecular systems.

Prof. Dr Christian Rüegg is Director of the Paul Scherrer Institut (PSI) and full professor of physics at ETH Zurich and EPFL, and professor at the University of Geneva. He is a member of the ETH Board representing the four Research Institutes (PSI, Empa, WSL, Eawag) and a member of the board of FHNW. Christian Rüegg initiated the PSI Center for Scientific Computing, Theory, and Data in 2021. The new Center complements PSI’s leading large-scale research infrastructures with cutting-edge computing, modelling, theory, and data capabilities and includes a local hub of the Swiss Data Science Center (SDSC) and of the national center on computational design and discovery of novel materials (MARVEL).

Peter is a Professor in the department of Aeronautics at Imperial College, working at the interface between mathematics, computing, fluid dynamics, and aeronautical engineering. He has a PhD from the department of Aeronautics at Imperial College in the field of Computational Fluid Dynamics, and previously served as a Postdoctoral Scholar in the department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Stanford University. He is a 2016 Gordon Bell Prize finalist, and a 2016 Philip Leverhulme Prize winner. He plays an active role in his community, co-leading the PyFR project, and acting as a Principal Editor for Computer Physics Communications. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Aeronautical Society.