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When
Mon 22, Jul, 2024
9:00 am - 12:30 pm
Where
Rhode Island Convention Center
1 Sabin St
Providence, RI, 02903
United States
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Workshop - Empowering Careers: Bringing WHPC’s Impact to the PEARC Community

The 19th International Women in HPC Workshop will take place at PEARC24 in Providence, RI, USA, with the primary objective of nurturing a diverse and inclusive Research Computing and Data (RCD) and High-Performance Computing (HPC) community. Our overarching goal is to cultivate competencies geared towards appreciating the value of a diverse workforce and establishing an inclusive environment that welcomes all Humans. This workshop the first time that WHPC is formally engaging with PEARC and our agenda focuses on bringing the communities together through shared values of diversity and inclusion, encompassing both women and men from underrepresented groups.

The focal points of the WHPC@PEARC24 workshop include:

  • Enhancing diversity and inclusion across the entire RCD and HPC workforce.
  • Facilitating a deeper comprehension of the nuances of diversity, equity, and inclusion across various demographic groups.
  • Strategies for recruitment, retention, and success.
  • Promoting community building through interactive networking opportunities.
  • Emphasizing the importance of learning from and valuing diverse experiences and career trajectories.

The WHPC@PEARC24 half-day workshop has two main priorities. First, our focus is on introducing the WHPC organization to the PEARC audience. We will feature short talks from the WHPC executive committee and local chapter organizers. These talks will set the stage for building a network and collaborating further with the attendees.

Our second focus is on building connections within our community, particularly for early career individuals. We will present a few short talks around career paths, specifically aimed at early and/or mid career individuals. We will also hold an interactive networking session, allowing the PEARC audience to interact directly with active WHPC members.

Agenda

Check out this year’s speakers!
Time
Activity
People
9:00 Session 1: Open House
Session Chair

Amanda Black
9:00–9:15 Welcome: WHPC History and Overview
Workshop Chair

Elsa Gonsiorowski
9:15–9:30 Founding Chapters Gladys Andino
9:30–10:15 Networking and small group breakouts Elsa Gonsiorowski
10:15–10:30 Report back from breakouts
10:30–11:00 Coffee Break
11:00 Session 2: Career Development
Session Chair

Elsa Gonsiorowski
11:00–11:15 Northeast Chapter overview Kaylea Nelson and Krista Valladares
11:15–12:00
Career Talks

1: Testimonial from a Mid-Career

2: Career Perspectives

3: Importance of Diversity
Speakers

1: Amanda Black

2: Jacalyn Huband

3: Christina Gancayco
12:00–12:20 Panel Discussion
Session Chair

Janna Nugent
12:20–12:30 Workshop Outcomes and Closeup

Committee

The WHPC workshop at PEARC24 would not be possible without a dedicated team of volunteers.

Workshop Co-chairs:

  • Elsa Gonsiorowski
  • Gladys Andino
  • Amanda Black
  • Janna Nugent
  • Subhashini Sivagnanam
  • Claire Stirm

Gladys Andino

Headshot of Gladys Andino

Gladys Andino, Ph.D., is the IT-Research Computing’s Strategic Services and Education Manager. She leads strategic planning and user training programs, coordinating workshops and tutorials to meet the dynamic needs of UVA’s computational research community. Gladys also manages a team of student workers, enhancing IT-Research Computing’s efficiency and providing early exposure to HPC and scientific computing.

As Founder and Chair of Purdue Women in HPC (2016-2019) and Virginia Women in HPC (since 2021), Gladys advocates for gender diversity, equity, and inclusion. She has significantly grown the Virginia Women in HPC program, collaborating with seven Virginia institutions to enhance diversity and inclusivity in technology. Gladys organizes virtual events with distinguished technical speakers, fostering a supportive community.

Amanda Black

Amanda Black is a cyberinfrastructure systems analyst. She has formal training in teaching, computational biology, and computer infrastructure. Amanda loves talking to researchers about their research and showing them how HPC can facilitate them in their work.

Elsa Gonsiorowski

Elsa Gonsiorowski is a HPC Support Specialist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory where she focuses on HPC I/O issues. She graduated with a Ph.D. in Computer Science in 2016 from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Elsa has been an active member of WHPC since 2016 and is an advocate for both women and men of underrepresented groups.</p

Janna Nugent

Janna Nugent is the Manager of Research Computing Infrastructure at Northwestern University.  Janna’s engineering team provides 24×7 operational support of Quest, Northwestern’s 88,000 core HPC cluster. Janna’s focus is on architecting for the future to create the most useful, efficient and performant HPC systems possible at Northwestern, while fostering engineering staff new to HPC. Janna holds a Master’s degree in computer science from the University of Chicago.

Subhashini Sivagnanam

Subhashini Sivagnanam leads the Cyberinfrastructure Solutions and Services (CISS) group at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC). Her primary areas of research focus are in the fields of distributed computing, cyberinfrastructure development, scientific data management, and reproducible science. She is a co-founder of Women in HPC at SDSC affiliate at the University of California, San Diego.

Claire Strim

Claire Stirm has worked alongside research domain scientists using cyberinfrastructure and HPC for the last ten years. She is the Consulting Lead for the Science Gateways Center of Excellence (SGX3) and a community manager for the Wildfire Technology Commons at the San Diego Supercomputer Center. Claire is a co-founder of Women in HPC at SDSC affiliate at the University of California, San Diego.

Additional Workshop Speakers

Christina Gancayco

Whether it’s debugging code or demystifying high-performance computing (HPC), Christina loves to help researchers solve tough problems. She currently supports researchers as a Computational Consultant with Stanford Research Computing. Prior to joining the research computing workforce, Christina used HPC to study mild traumatic brain injury and neurodegenerative disease. She holds a B.S.E. in Biomedical Engineering with a minor in Theater Studies from Duke University

Christina is presenting on the importance of diversity.

Jacalyn Huband

Jacalyn (Jackie) Huband, Ph.D. is the Assistant Director of the Data Analytics Center (DAC) within Research Computing at the University of Virginia (UVA). In addition to managing the DAC resources, she is a facilitator to researchers who are transitioning their codes onto a high-performance computing (HPC) platform. She also has been instrumental in creating learning opportunities within Research Computing, including Workshops, Brown Bag Lunches, and Journal Clubs. Prior to her work at UVA, Jackie has been an Associate Professor in Computer Science and a programmer in industry. She has experience programming in R, Python, Matlab, C/C++, and Fortran.

Jacalyn Huband is presenting about her career perspective.

Kaylea Nelson (Northeast Chapter)

Kaylea Nelson is the Director of Arts & Sciences Research Computing at the Yale Center for Research Computing, which supports the advanced computing needs of Yale’s research community. She leads the research computing facilitation team at the YCRC and ensures the YCRC meets the needs of the university researchers from the physical sciences, social sciences and humanities. Kaylea’s own research background is in computational cosmology, running large scale simulations of galaxy clusters. Beyond Yale, Kaylea is a co-program manager for the NSF-funded CAREERS Cyberteam and co-chair of the Women in HPC Northeast Chapter.

Kaylea Nelson is contributing to a presentation on the WHPC Northeast Chapter.

Paula Sanematsu (Northeast Chapter)

Paula Sanematsu is a Senior Research Computing Facilitator with the Faculty of Arts & Science Research Computing at Harvard University. Before joining Harvard, she worked in a wide range of computational modeling projects from flow and nanoparticle transport in porous media (as part of the Advanced Energy Consortium) to tissue mechanics during embryonic development. She is interested in supercomputing, computational fluid dynamics, numerical modeling, and scientific visualization.

Paula will be contributing to a presentation on the WHPC Northeast Chapter.

Krista Valladares (Northeast Chapter)

Krista Valladares is an Associate Director of Technology Strategy and Planning at Harvard University and the founder and co-chair of the WHPC Northeast Chapter. Her work at Harvard focuses mainly on advising, consulting, and managing IT and AI programs within the academic and administrative landscape, leading technology assessments across campus, and capacity building efforts with Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs) in partnership with the Minority Serving – Cyberinfrastructure Consortium (MS-CC).

Within the last several years, Krista has dedicated her expertise to advancing IT and Research Computing activities at Harvard, topics that include data storage, cloud computing, regulated data environments, and the concept of a data commons. In 2022, Krista worked alongside the University Research Computing Officer to create a centralized Research Computing office focusing on the strategic aspects of delivering services and providing resources that enable the advancement of research at Harvard.

Krista will be contributing to a presentation on the WHPC Northeast Chapter.

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