Lisa Arafune is the Director of Forge Policy Solutions.

She has a wealth of experience in government relations, including more than a decade representing higher education and university-based research interests on Capitol Hill. She has advocated for the research community and major federal science agencies, including NSF, DOD, USDA, NIH, DOE, and NASA.

Ms Arafune leads her own government relations firm and has managed federal relations for Purdue University as Director of the Washington, DC Office. Her interest in politics began when working in a state senate and later as Chief Clerk for a U.S. House of Representatives Congressional Committee.

Ms Arafune holds a Master’s of Science in Management from Purdue University and an MBA from Budapest University of Economic Sciences.

George Beckett is a senior project manager, at the University of Edinburgh, with more than 15 years of experience managing software-engineering and computational-science projects with both commercial and academic partners. He specialises in supercomputing for major facilities and is presently involved in both the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (in construction in Chile) and the Extreme Light Infrastructure (being established across Czech Republic, Hungary, and Romania).

Previously, during 2012–2015, George was the Deputy Director of the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre in Perth, Western Australia. His role at Pawsey focused on promoting uptake of supercomputing facilities, developing the computational-research community in Australia and securing funding to support it, as well as growing Pawsey’s capabilities to support the significant Australian radio-astronomy community (most notably the Square Kilometre Array telescope and its precursors).

George has an academic background in computational mathematics: graduating with an Honours degree in mathematics from New College, Oxford and a Ph.D. in Computation Mathematics from the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow.

Dr. Mozhgan Kabiri Chimeh joined NVIDIA in January 2020, helping bring GPU and HPC to the growing user community in Europe and worldwide. She leads the hackathons and boot camps in the EMEA region. She is a community builder passionate about open-source software and is actively involved in the HPC and RSE communities. As a Software Sustainability Institute Fellow and Research Software Engineer (RSE) advocate, she actively promotes reproducible and sustainable software using HPC, particularly GPUs, through training, seminars, research software consultancy, and outreach. Before joining NVIDIA, Mozhgan was a post-doctoral researcher in massive-scale complex systems simulation with accelerated computing at the University of Sheffield, UK. She worked in complex system modelling using emerging high-performance parallel architectures.
She holds a Ph.D. in computer science and an M.S. in information technology both from the University of Glasgow, UK

Mariann Hardey is a Digital Culture, Technology, and Business Professor at the Durham University Business School. She is also a member of Advanced Research Computing (ARC) at the University of Durham, where her role promotes inclusiveness and participation in computing. Mariann advocates for self-improvement in education, focusing on representation among business leaders and technology practitioners. Her work has been featured in international media, and she has given numerous presentations at international conferences and events, including the first TEDx event in the United Kingdom. Mariann’s two most recent books are The Culture of Women in Technology: An Unsuitable Job for a Woman and Household Self-Tracking in a Global Health Crisis. Both have been recognised by technical organisations and the academy. The Culture of Women in Tech is included in the Master Class curriculum of the UK Government Digital Service to promote employment reform and diversity. Her upcoming book, WFH: Women Freedom and the Hidden Cost of Working From Home, explores the boundaries of women’s digital work outside of traditional settings and asks if it is possible to achieve a genuinely flexible and inclusive way of working.

Molly is the SVP of Marketing at Hammerspace.

She brings over 15 years of product and growth marketing leadership experience to the Hammerspace team. Molly has led the marketing organization and strategy at fast growth, innovators such as Pantheon Platform, Qumulo, Quantum Corporation, DataDirect Networks (DDN), and SpectraLogic. In these companies she was responsible for the go-to-market strategy for SaaS, hybrid cloud, and data center solutions across a range of data intensive verticals and use cases. She also founded the ActiveArchive Alliance, an industry coalition formed to educate end users on the evolving new technologies that enable reliable, online and efficient access to archived data and was a SNIA Board Member for several years.

Christine Runnegar serves as Board Chair of the Internet Security Research Group which serves as a home for public-benefit digital infrastructure projects such as the Let’s Encrypt certificate authority and Prossimo on memory safety. Christine is Senior Director, Internet Trust at the Internet Society advocating for an open, globally connected, secure and trustworthy Internet. With a background in regulatory litigation and an international outlook, Christine complements her security and privacy expertise with a deep appreciation of how technology works.

Christine co-chairs the W3C Privacy Interest Group (PING), bringing privacy-by-design to Web standards, and has served in the International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP) Privacy Engineering Section Advisory Board, and European Union Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA) Permanent Stakeholders Group.

Elsa Gonsiorowski is a HPC technical support consultant at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where she specializes in I/O support and documentation. She graduated in 2016 with a Ph.D. in computer science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Elsa has been an active member and volunteer for WHPC since she was first accepted as an early career lighting speaker at the WHPC SC15 workshop.

Eleanor joined EPCC in October 2020 after graduating from the University of York with a MPhys degree in Theoretical Physics. She works in the team supporting the users of ARCHER2 and Cirrus to provide technical user support, training and service improvement. She also provides consultancy on research projects centred around optimising AI frameworks, porting applications to GPU and energy efficiency.

Eleanor serves on the Women in HPC (WHPC) Executive Board, as Treasurer after a year in the Director of Chapters and Affiliates role. She also regularly volunteers on international WHPC conference committees to promote the inclusion, visibility and development of women in HPC internationally.