President: Dr. Deepa Phanish
Contact: dnagendra3@gatech.edu
Deepa joined the PACE team in June 2022, where she works closely with Georgia Tech researchers, facilitating their computational efforts and conducting outreach workshops. Prior to joining PACE, and was a post-doctoral fellow in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Georgia Tech (where she also obtained her MS and PhD!) working on estimation and detection problems in sensor networks. She has been actively participating in the Vertically Integrated Projects (VIP) program during her tenure at Georgia Tech, advising the Satdium-IoPT team and leading their sensor networks and machine learning projects. She also has extensive industry experience working as a network planning engineer at Cox Communications and embedded systems developer at PathPartner Technology. Her research areas of interest include high performance computational physics, network optimization, and hybrid modeling in machine learning. She is a senior member of IEEE and has won numerous awards for her work including the Sigma Xi best Ph.D. thesis award at Georgia Tech.
Vice President/Internal Coordinator: Neda Tavakoli
Contact: neda.tavakoli1@gatech.edu
Neda has proved herself as a leader in many occasions. More notably, she developed a Google proposal that was funded and received an NCWIT Student Seed Fund gift of $3,000 sponsored by Google.org to start a new ACM-W chapter on campus for EWOCS organization. Joining WHPC at Georgia Tech as a leader gives her the opportunity to provide a more equitable environment for the HPC community as well as exploring more funding resources to support women in high performance computing on campus with the goal of encouraging more women (graduate and undergraduate) involvement in computing, promote networking, allow for collaboration with different organizations to provide more opportunities and help members succeed in their career goals. It will also encourage collaboration between undergraduate students, graduate students, and faculty to promote diversity.
Director of Events/Marketing: Shweta Dutta
Contact: shweta@gatech.edu
Shweta is a PhD candidate in ECE at Georgia Tech. Her research is in space weather forecasting and ionospheric modeling using machine learning techniques, and she uses PACE to train her models. Shweta obtained her BS in Electrical Engineering with a minor in English from Caltech in 2019, and has interned and worked for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Director of Events/Marketing: Valeriia Rubanova
Contact: vrubanova3@gatech.edu
Valeriia is a BS student in Computer Engineering at Georgia Tech. Since February 2020, Valeriia has served as Event Planning Executive at VOICE Peer Education, organization on GT campus that aims to prevent and raise awareness about sexual violence. During that time, she collaborated with various student organisations on campus, organised events to raise awareness about sexual violence and its prevention techniques and facilitated educational presentations. She believes that broader marketing of the events organised by WHPC, as well as recruiting more women to participate in Mentor/Mentee program is essential for the organization to grow on GT campus.
Director of Mentor/Mentee Relations: Kezhou (Melody) Lu
Contact: kezhou.lu@eas.gatech.edu
Kezhou is a PhD candidate in EAS working on atmospheric physics and climate dynamics. Her research involves operating global climate models on computational clusters.
Since 2018, Kezhou has served as the chair of the graduate student symposium at Graduate in Earth and Atmospheric Sciences (GEAS) and the chair of the graduate-hosted seminar committee at GEAS. The graduate-hosted seminar is an event where students are able to invite a prestigious scientist in their field to give a seminar. As the chair, she organizes the event by calling for nominations, setting up a poll to decide on speakers, communicating and inviting the speakers, scheduling and hosting the seminar.
Former President: Fang (Cherry) Liu
Contact: fang.liu@gatech.edu
Dr. Liu has nearly 20 years of experience in High Performance Computing where she worked closely with world-class researchers and faculty members in solving their computational needs on the large-scale computing system. Dr. Liu is a research scientist in Gatech PACE HPC center and an adjunct associate professor with the School of Computational Science and Engineering at Gatech. Dr. Liu has served on multiple Ph.D. dissertation committees, and supervised dozens of students in their research projects.
Before joining Gatech, Dr. Liu was an assistant scientist at the Mathematics and Computational Science Division in the Department of Energy (USDOE) Ames Laboratory where she gained extensive experience on the world’s largest supercomputers.
Dr. Liu actively contributed to the HPC community by serving on program committees on various HPC related conferences, e.g. HPC, ICCS, ICCSA, CBHPC, ICPP, PEARC, SC, etc. She mentored minority and underrepresented students in the conferences, e.g. Supercomputing and PEARC. Dr. Liu often found herself among the few women in HPC meetings so she wants to encourage more female students to enter the HPC field.