Meet the Speakers

Jon Brown
^{VP & Publisher, Market Intelligence, TechTarget}

Jon Brown has spent 20+ years as a technologist, analyst, and IT media publisher with a focus on IT infrastructure, storage, and systems management. Prior to TechTarget, Jon held senior leadership roles with several US and UK-based software publishers. He is a regular event speaker, moderator, and host, based in Denver, USA.​

He earned a BA from Amherst College and his MBA in International Marketing from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. 

Gina Tourassi
^{Director of the National Center for Computational Sciences, Oak Ridge National Laboratory}

After Tourassi completed her graduate studies at Duke University, she was awarded a postdoctoral position in the Department of Radiology at Duke University Medical Center. Within her first year, she received the National Institutes of Health Young Investigator Award, which launched her academic career. Over the next 16 years, Tourassi held positions as an assistant, associate, and then adjunct professor at Duke University School of Medicine.

In 2011, Tourassi joined ORNL as the director for the Biomedical Science and Engineering Center. She was hired to grow the research portfolio at ORNL. In 2013, she became the director of ORNL’s Health Data Sciences Institute. In 2019, only three months before the COVID-19 pandemic took hold of the United States, Tourassi became the NCCS director.

Tourassi has also led the division as it has prepared for the installation and launch of the Frontier system. Frontier will offer best-in-class traditional scientific modeling and simulation capabilities while also leading the world in artificial intelligence and data analytics.

As director of the NCCS, Tourassi has continued to perform hands-on research. She currently leads the National Cancer Institute and DOE partnership, in addition to her role at the NCCS. The partnership is accelerating advances in predicting cancer using computing.

Dave Kepczynski
^{Chief Information Officer, GE Research}

As chief information officer for GE Research, Dave leads a global team that develops, enables, and scales value-driven digital technologies and advanced digital capabilities for GE Research, the GE businesses, and U.S. government customers.

His team’s most recent innovations and missions include: next generation heterogeneous enterprise high-performance computing products and services with GPU acceleration and VIS capabilities; enterprise advanced materials platform for materials development and management; enterprise central highwall for critical intellectual property security; enterprise knowledge management communities and wikis for collaboration and problem solving; research analytics cloud with big data, machine learning as a service and digital thread for design automations; multitenant GovCloud landing zone and CMMC certification for government regulated data; research 5G technology testbeds for technology demonstrators; and custom software engineering for research customer relationship management, portfolio/project management, and government operations.

Prior to his current role, Dave served as engineering chief information officer for GE Oil & Gas where his teams drove digital transformation within engineering product development and across functions. Before joining GE, Dave spent more than 25 years with General Motors, leading teams in global systems development & operations, product development, and global manufacturing.

Dave currently serves as chair of the United States Department of Energy’s Exascale Computing Project Industry & Agency Council and chair of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Digital Engineering Integration Committee. He’s a governing body member of Gartner/Evanta’s regional CIO/CISO network.

Dave holds a Master of Science in Engineering and Management of Technology from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering from Kettering University. He is a Design for Six Sigma (DFSS) Black Belt.

Dr. Asmeret Asefaw Berhe
^{Director of the Office of Science, U.S. Department of Energy}

Dr. Asmeret Asefaw Berhe is the Director of the Office of Science for the U.S. Department of Energy. Dr. Berhe was most recently a Professor of Soil Biogeochemistry; the Ted and Jan Falasco Chair in Earth Sciences and Geology; and Interim Associate Dean for Graduate Education at the University of California, Merced. Her research was at the intersection of soil science, global change science, and political ecology with an emphasis on how the soil system regulates the earth’s climate and the dynamic two-way relationship between the natural environment and human communities.

She previously served as the Chair of the US National Committee on Soil Science at the National Academies; was a Leadership board member for the Earth Science Women’s Network; and is currently a co-principal investigator in the ADVANCEGeo Partnership – a National Science Foundation funded effort to empower (geo)scientists to respond to and prevent harassment, discrimination, bullying and other exclusionary behaviors in research environments. Her scholarship on how physical processes such as erosion, fire, and changes in climate affect the biogeochemical cycling of essential elements in the earth system and her efforts to ensure equity and inclusion of people from all walks of life in the scientific enterprise have received numerous awards and honors. She is a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union and the Geological Society of America, and a member of the inaugural class of the US National Academies New Voices in Science, Engineering, and Medicine.

Berhe was born and raised in Asmara, Eritrea. She received a B.Sc. in Soil and Water Conservation from the University of Asmara, an M.Sc. in Political Ecology from Michigan State University, and a Ph.D. in Biogeochemistry from the University of California, Berkeley. In 2020 she was named a Great Immigrant, Great American by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

Tim Williams
^{Computational Scientist, Deputy Director, Argonne’s Computational Science Division}

Dr. Timothy Williams is the Deputy Director of Argonne’s Computational Science Division. During 2016-2018, Tim served as Deputy Director of Science for the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF), for which he still manages the Early Science Program. Since 2009, he has worked with a number of large-scale projects using ALCF’s supercomputers, especially those in the area of plasma physics.

From 2000-2006, Tim worked as a quantitative software developer in the financial industry, writing pricing and risk software for Morgan Stanley in New York and Citadel in Chicago. From 1995-2000, he was a staff scientist at LANL’s Scientific Computing Group and Advanced Computing Laboratory, working on a C++ framework for parallel scientific computing. Starting as a postdoc in the Magnetic Fusion Energy group and Massively Parallel Computing Initiative at LLNL, and later on the NERSC staff; Tim spent 1989-1995 doing research in tokamak plasma turbulence and other areas, and developing a long-term interest in large-scale parallel computing.

Christine Goulet
^{Executive Director for Applied Science, Southern California Earthquake Center, University of Southern California}

Christine Goulet is the Executive Director for Applied Science at the Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC). In that role, she acts as the science lead and technical integrator for large-scale collaborative projects involving diverse disciplines related to earthquake hazard and risk. Her work and research interests are in the field of geotechnical earthquake engineering and applied seismology in the context of performance-based design, with a focus on ground-motion modeling, structural response to ground motions and seismic hazard analysis.

Dr. Goulet studied Geological Engineering in Canada and obtained her Ms. and Ph.D. degrees in Civil Engineering from UCLA where she developed a graduate course on ground-motion characterization for engineers. Before joining SCEC in 2015, she co-led the NGA-East Program at the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research center (PEER), the largest ground-motion modeling project conducted in the U.S. Prior to that, Dr. Goulet has worked as a consultant for several engineering and seismology projects.

Andrew G. McArthur, Ph.D.
^{Director, Biomedical Discovery and Commercialization Program, McMaster University}

The McArthur laboratory’s research program is rooted in bioinformatics, functional genomics, and computational biology. It spans complex informatics approaches to the functional genomics of microbial drug resistance, development of biological databases, next generation sequencing for genome assembly and molecular epidemiology, automated literature curation approaches, controlled vocabularies for biological knowledge integration, and functional genomics approaches in environmental toxicology. As part of our Cisco funded program, we additionally research the use and generation of ‘Big Data’ in the biomedical sciences, with the goal of integrating biomedical research and clinical healthcare.

Alison Kennedy
^{Director, STFC Hartree Centre, Co-Founder of Women in HPC}

Alison Kennedy has recently been appointed as Strategic Advisor for eInfrastructure (High Performance Computing (HPC) and AI) to the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) in the UK. Until the end of March 2022, she was Director of the Hartree Centre whose mission is to accelerate the adoption of technologies such as HPC, HPDA, AI and quantum computing by UK industry, leading to economic and productivity gains for the UK. Backed by £172m of government money to launch the Hartree National Centre for Digital Innovation, the centre has recently extended its collaboration with IBM Research in this 5 year programme. Prior to joining the Hartree Centre in 2016, Alison held dual roles as an Executive Director of EPCC, the national HPC Centre based at the University of Edinburgh and as Managing Director of the PRACE aisbl (Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe).

She has undergraduate degrees in History and in Mathematics and Technology and a post-graduate degree in Business Administration. Alison began her working life as a real-time systems programmer in industry, progressing to roles in project management, software product management and in sales. She has now worked in HPC for almost 30 years, managing large organisations, projects and collaborations in HPC, Data and AI. Alison is a co-founder of the Women in HPC organisation, served as the organisation’s first Chair and currently sits on WHPC’s Advisory Board.

Bronis de Supinski
^{Chief Technology Officer for Livermore Computing, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory}

Bronis R. de Supinski is the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for Livermore Computing (LC) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). In this role, he is responsible for formulating LLNL’s large-scale computing strategy and overseeing its implementation. His position requires frequent interaction with high performance computing (HPC) leaders and he oversees several collaborations with the HPC industry as well as academia. He is also the LLNL principal point of contact for the Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing (SciDAC) program’s Institute for Sustained Performance, Energy and Resilience (SUPER), for which he leads the resilience thrust.

Prior to becoming CTO for LC, Bronis led several research projects in LLNL’s Center for Applied Scientific Computing (CASC). Most recently, he led the Exascale Computing Technologies (ExaCT) project and co-led the Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASC) program’s Application Development Environment and Performance Team (ADEPT). ADEPT is responsible for the development environment, including compilers, tools and run time systems, on LLNL’s large-scale systems. ExaCT explored several critical directions related to programming models, algorithms, performance, code correctness and resilience for future large scale systems. He currently continues his interests in these topics, particularly programming models, and serves as the Chair of the OpenMP Language Committee.

Bronis earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Virginia in 1998, and he joined CASC in July 1998. His dissertation investigated shared memory coherence based on isotach logical time systems. His research has covered a wide range of topics, including applications of data mining techniques to performance analysis and modeling including performance modeling through non-linear regression techniques (i.e., artificial neural networks and piecewise polynomial regression), investigations into mechanisms and tools to improve memory performance, a variety of optimization techniques and tools for MPI, and several issues with OpenMP, including its memory model and tool support.

Throughout his career, Bronis has won several awards, including the prestigious Gordon Bell Prize in 2005 and 2006, as well as an R&D 100 for his leadership of a team that developed a novel scalable debugging tool. He serves on the program committees of numerous conferences and workshops. He is a member of the ACM and the IEEE Computer Society.

Gabe Turner
^{HPC Solutions Architect, 3M}

Gabe Turner is an HPC Solutions Architect in 3M’s Corporate Research Systems Laboratory and has been a research computing professional for 22 years. Specializing in high-performance computing solutions, he has worked in both academia and private industry with a focus on delighting scientists and engineers with modeling and simulation productivity improvements.

Andreas Prein
^{Project Scientist, NCAR}

Andreas Prein is a Project Scientist II at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado, USA. He is working with the Capacity Center for Climate and Weather Extremes (C3WE) in the Mesoscale & Microscale Meteorology Laboratory (MMM). Andreas has a Ph.D. in Physics and a Master in Environmental System Sciences from the University of Graz in Austria. He is an Associate Editor for the Journal Frontiers in Earth Science: Atmospheric Science and a Guest Editor, Journal of the Meteorological Society of Japan (JMSJ) and Scientific Online Letters on the Atmosphere (SOLA), Japan. He serves as a member on the GEWEX Hydroclimatology Panel (GHP), is a steering committee member on the WCRP Digital Earths Lighthouse Activity, and helps to coordinate international community activities in the area of kilometer-scale climate modeling.

His research focuses on an improved understanding of the physical processes that change the frequency and intensity of extreme events in a warming climate. This includes changes in processes across all scales of motions, ranging from microscales to synoptic-scales, with his main interest being hydrologic extreme events.

Kimmo Koski
^{Managing Director, CSC – IT Center for Science Ltd.}

Dr. Kimmo Koski Managing Director, CSC – the Finnish IT Center for Science Kimmo Koski started in his current position as Managing Director of the Finnish IT center for science, CSC, in August 2004. Prior to his present position, Koski spent 4.5 years in Nokia Research Center and Nokia Technology Platform. Earlier work experience includes 10 years at CSC in various positions and a one-year visiting period in CERN in Switzerland. Koski received his doctorate from Helsinki University of Technology in January 1996. His dissertation was on Metacomputing Technology. During the recent years Koski has been active in building European HPC and data infrastructure through chair and vice-chair positions in major EU initiatives, such as PRACE (supercomputing) and EUDAT (data infrastructures). He has also actively participated in data center development including the establishment of the eco-efficient CSC datacenter located in a former paper-mill in Kajaani, Finland. In addition to several European positions, Koski has also been active in building the Nordic collaboration including steering group position in Nordic e-Infrastructure Collaboration (NeIC).

Justin Hotard
^{Executive Vice President & General Manager, HPE}

Justin leads HPE’s High Performance Computing (HPC) & Artificial Intelligence (AI) business group. The HPC & AI teams provide crucial digital transformation and artificial intelligence capabilities to customers who are involved in addressing some of the world’s most complex problems through data intensive workloads. The HPC & AI portfolio includes the HPE Cray EX, HPE Cray AI Development Environment, HPE Apollo, HPE Superdome Flex, and HPE NonStop solutions.

Justin’s business also includes Hewlett Packard Labs, the central applied research group for the company, established in 1966 by founders Bill Hewlett and David Packard.

While at HPE, Justin previously served as president & managing director of HPE Japan. In that role, he was responsible for all people and business operations in Japan, overseeing HPE’s activity in the region to drive growth across the full portfolio of hardware, software, and services. Justin also previously led the Compute Global Business Unit, overseeing the product portfolio and R&D for HPE’s industry standard server portfolio, as well as the go-to-market strategy for the OEM, Service Provider, and Telecommunications segments. Most recently, Justin led pan-HPE transformation efforts to accelerate the company’s as-a-service pivot.

Prior to joining HPE in 2015, Justin was president of NCR Small Business where he scaled the company’s Cloud POS business growing its subscription revenue 10x in under 2 years. At NCR, he also oversaw over $3.5B in acquisitions as vice president of Corporate Development and served as the general manager of NCR Entertainment where he grew the business before selling it to Outerwall, Inc. Before NCR, he held corporate development and operating positions at Symbol Technologies and Motorola, Inc.

Justin holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a Master of Business Administration from the MIT Sloan School of Management.

Trish Damkroger
^{Chief Product Officer, HPC & AI Business Unit, HPE}

Trish Damkroger joined Hewlett Packard Enterprise in April 2022 as Senior Vice President and Chief Product Officer for the HPC & AI business unit. In this role,
she leads the end-to-end product strategy for the organization, driving efforts
to scale the business to enable the next wave of growth and innovation.
Prior to joining HPE, Trish was Vice President and General Manager of the HPC
group at Intel, responsible for setting the technical HPC strategy from exascale
to department level supercomputers.

Before Intel, Trish was the Acting Associate Director of Computation at
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory leading a group of more than a
thousand supercomputing engineering and scientific experts. She has also
served as Program Manager for the Advanced & Exploratory Weapon System
Program at Sandia National Laboratories where she managed technical
programs related to advanced weapon technology. Since 2006, Trish has been
a leader of the annual Supercomputing Conference (SC) series, the premier
international meeting for high performance computing.

Trish holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from the
California Polytechnic State University and a Master of Science degree in
Electrical Engineering from Stanford University.

Shin-Wen Kuo
^{SVP & Chief Operating Officer, HPC & AI Business Unit, HPE}

Shin-Wen currently serves as the Chief Operating Officer for Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s (HPE’s) $3B High Performance Computing & Artificial Intelligence business group, leading an organization of over 600 that deploys and supports the world’s fastest high-performance computing systems.

Shin-Wen is an international technology executive with 25+ years of demonstrated success building and transforming software, hardware, and services companies ranging in size and complexity from start-ups of $100M in revenue to large enterprises of $120B in revenue. She excels at translating strategy into execution to build and scale new businesses, drive revenue and profit growth, and deliver operational excellence. Previously at HPE, she was General Manager for the Core Rack and Tower Compute business, the General Manager for the Hybrid IT China business, and has led teams in Corporate Strategy and Operations. Prior to HPE, Shin-Wen founded the London office and led the Northern European for a start-up which was acquired post-IPO by Ariba (now SAP).

Shin-Wen has a passion for developing strong leaders, opportunities for diverse talent, and a sustainable culture. She has developed and delivered formal trainings as executive faculty for HP’s Stanford Innovation and Entrepreneurship Program, been a guest lecturer at London Business School, and coached and mentored hundreds of team members through roundtables, presentations, and 1:1 sessions. Shin-Wen has also served on the board of the Women’s Business Council Southwest.

Born in Taiwan and raised in the United States, Shin-Wen received a B.S., magna cum laude, in Chemical Engineering from Rice University and started her career at The Boston Consulting Group. Shin-Wen is a global citizen who has lived and worked in the Americas, Europe, and Asia, is a dual citizen of the United States and the United Kingdom, and is fluent in English and Mandarin.

Janice Zdankus
^{Vice President, Chief Technology Office Strategy, HPE}

Janice Zdankus is vice president, innovation for social impact, in Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s Office of the CTO. In this role, Janice leads HPE’s Tech for Good program and drives client, market, and industry research and planning for innovation with the potential to drive real and positive change. By bringing together industry, technology, academia, and government partners to solve key societal challenges, with an initial focus on hunger/agriculture and healthcare, global impact can be delivered and scaled.

Paul Hunter
^{Managing Director, HPE North America}