2017 Winner Ilkay Altintas

lkay Altintas is the 2017 ACM SIGHPC Emerging Woman Leader in Technical Computing award winner. Dr. Altintas is director of Workflows for Data Science Center of Excellence, division director of Cyberinfrastructure Research, Education, and Development, and Chief Data Science Officer at the University of California’s San Diego Supercomputer Center. She is recognized “for research leadership that makes distributed scientific and technical computing applications more reusable, scalable, and reproducible.” 

The Emerging Woman Leader in Technical Computing award is unique in recognizing mid-career women in the technical and high performance computing communities. The award is presented every two years in recognition of the candidate’s impact on her chosen field, as indicated by early career achievements and her commitment to growing our community through service and mentorship. The award was presented at the annual SC conference, the HPC community's most prestigious annual gathering.

Dr. Altintas’ research focuses on approaches to make distributed computing and workflow systems more programmable, reusable, scalable and reproducible. With over 100 journal articles and conference papers, her work has been applied to computations in bioinformatics, geoinformatics, high-energy physics, multi-scale biomedical science, computational drug discovery, smart manufacturing, hazard management, and smart cities. She is a co-founding developer of Kepler, a widely-used tool that enables research teams to build and run workflows, and to share computational results across a broad range of scientific and engineering disciplines. Her publications in this area are extensively cited.

In addition to undergraduate teaching, Ilkay leads courses in data science and big data on the popular online learning platforms Coursera and EdX. She is an active mentor for women pursuing careers in HPC and data science, and has supervised students for the University of California at San Diego, Monash University, and the University of Queensland. She also serves on the editorial boards of several journals, and on the organizing committees of a wide variety of conferences and workshops related to technical and scientific computing. 

Dr. Altintas received her bachelor and master’s degrees at Middle East Technical University in Turkey, and her PhD in computational science at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands.