2025 Winner

ACM’s Special Interest Group on High Performance Computing (SIGHPC) has named Prof. Sunita Chandrasekaran as the 2025 recipient of the Emerging Woman Leader in Technical Computing Award.

She is recognized for leading groundbreaking GPU-accelerated workflows on Exascale systems, seamlessly integrating in-transit machine learning to transform scientific simulations and set new standards in exascale computing. The award is presented at the annual SC conference, the HPC community's most prestigious gathering. 

Prof. Chandrasekaran, an Associate Professor at the University of Delaware (UD) and the Director of the First State AI Institute at UD, has emerged as a leader in high-performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI). She holds the David L. and Beverly J.C. Mills Career Development Chair, and serves as Vice Chair of the State of Delaware AI Commission. At the national level, she is an active member of DOE’s Advanced Scientific Computing Advisory Committee (ASCAC) and ORNL’s Computing and Computational Sciences Directorate (CCSD).

Prof. Chandrasekaran has made transformative technical contributions through DOE’s Exascale Computing Project, leading the SOLLVE initiative that delivered open-source LLVM implementations and testsuites to support OpenMP on GPU-accelerated architectures. Her leadership on the PIConGPU application as part of ORNL’s CAAR program stress-tested Frontier’s full 37,000+ GPU exascale system. By demonstrating real-time in-transit machine learning for plasma instabilities, her team bypassed traditional storage bottlenecks, pioneering new methods for data-intensive science. Her work has been widely recognized, including a Best Paper nomination at IPDPS 2025. With over $9.8 million in competitive funding from NSF, DOE, NIH, and industry, she has driven innovations spanning compiler technologies, scalable ML pipelines, and predictive modeling for scientific and medical applications. 

Beyond her research, Prof. Chandrasekaran is an educator and mentor, shaping the next generation of HPC leaders. She has guided students at all levels, many of whom have advanced to prominent roles at national labs and technology companies such as NVIDIA and AMD. Her service as a co-editor of the first OpenACC textbook and as an international tutorial presenter further highlights her dedication to community engagement and open science.

"Sunita exemplifies the spirit of this award, blending technical excellence with community leadership," said Michela Taufer, Dongarra Professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and Chair of the SIGHPC Emerging Woman Leader in Technical Computing Award Committee. "Her innovative work on GPU-accelerated, AI-driven workflows is reshaping how we approach exascale computing, while her mentorship and service ensure these advancements uplift the broader HPC community."