Panel Discussion

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.

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.

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.

Hindumathi Palanisamy, an oceanographer specialized in sea level science is a Scientific Officer for World Climate Research Programme in the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). In this role, she serves as the Secretariat focal point for three of WCRP’s core activities focusing on ocean, atmosphere and land Earth system components – CLIVAR, APARC and GEWEX projects. Additionally, she also coordinates the Global Precipitation Experiment (GPEX) and Research on Climate Intervention Lighthouse Activities of WCRP. She also serves as the WCRP focal points within WMO for activities related to hydrology and ocean. Hindumathi has a PhD in space oceanography from the University of Toulouse and French Space Agency in France. Prior to joining WCRP Secretariat, Hindumathi was a senior research scientist at the Centre for Climate Research Singapore where she focussed on developing regional sea level research expertise in the Southeast Asian region. Earlier to that, she worked for the European Space Agency’s Climate Change Initiative- Sea Level Budget Closure project in Toulouse, France.