2024 Winner

Dr. Mohror is a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff and Deputy Director of the Laboratory Directed Research and Development Program at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. She is recognized for her innovative and transformative contributions to HPC I/O and programming models and tools, as well as exemplary service and leadership in the HPC community. 

The Emerging Woman Leader in Technical Computing award honors mid-career women within the technical and HPC sectors. The award is presented annually in recognition of the awardee’s technical contributions and impact in growing the HPC community through service and mentorship. The award is presented at the annual SC conference, the HPC community's most prestigious gathering. 

Dr. Mohror is a leading researcher who has made significant contributions on a broad range of HPC I/O topics and on programming models and tools for exascale computing. Since 2012, she has led the Scalable Checkpoint/Restart Framework (SCR) effort, an award-winning, production-level checkpoint/restart library that reduces I/O overhead by orders of magnitude. Within the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Exascale Computing Project (ECP), one of her contributions was co-leading the development of UnifyFS, a production, user-level file system designed for node-local storage on supercomputers. 

Dr. Mohror is a dedicated and recognized leader within the HPC community. She has served on over 60 review panels for top-tier HPC conferences, workshops, and journals; and has had over 25 leadership roles for highly visible HPC technical activities, including Program Co-Chair for the 2022/23 ECP Annual Meetings and Technical Program Co-Chair for SC23.

"I continue to be in awe of the quality of the nominations that the EWLTC selection committee receives each year,” commented Dr. Cristina Beldica, Chair of the EWLTC Committee. “We were all inspired by these accomplished women from academia, national labs, and industry that are making significant contributions to HPC at the highest levels. Moreover, it’s not only what they accomplish for themselves, but also what they do for our community, how they change the culture for the better. We are delighted to have selected Dr. Kathryn Mohror to receive the SIGHPC Emerging Woman Leader in Technical Computing Award. Dr. Mohror is a superb leader with a clear vision for HPC and the demonstrated ability to bring this vision to life through her technical work, skillful and strategic handling of complex situations, perseverance, and collaboration.”

Dr. Kathryn Mohror received her bachelor’s degree in chemistry, and her master’s and Ph.D. in computer science from Portland State University, Portland, OR. Throughout her professional career, she has received numerous honors, fellowships, and awards, including the 2022 Oppenheimer Science and Energy Leadership Program Fellowship, a 2019 DOE Early Career Research award, and R&D 100 Awards for the Scalable Checkpoint/Restart Framework (2019) and the UnifyFS file system (2024).