ACM’s Special Interest Group on High Performance Computing (SIGHPC) has announced the eleven recipients of the ACM SIGHPC Computational and Data Science Fellowships for 2022. The fellowships are highly competitive, and are awarded after a rigorous merit review. The fellowship program, previously funded by Intel, is now funded exclusively by SIGHPC.

The program is intended to increase the diversity of students pursuing graduate degrees in data science and computational science, including women as well as students from racial/ethnic backgrounds that have been historically underrepresented in the computing field. The fellowship provides $15,000 annually for study anywhere in the world.

"SIGHPC strongly supports a mission of inclusion in the HPC community. If we are to be successful in that mission we must broaden the range of perspectives and ideas that form the foundation of our field. It’s critical to focus on students at the early career stage and provide opportunities for them," says Stephen Lien Harrell, chair of the Fellowship program for 2022. “We are honored to be able to make these awards as an organization, and to continue to build a broader, more resilient, and welcoming community."

Students were nominated by their graduate advisors. Nominees spanned disciplines from biomedical engineering and computer science to quantum chemistry and geophysics, and represented large, mid-sized, and small institutions in countries around the world. More than 90% of nominees were female, and 45% were identified as an underrepresented minority in their country of study.

The nominations were evaluated and ranked by a panel of experts (who were themselves diverse with respect to race, gender, discipline, and nationality) based on nominees’ overall potential for excellence in data science and/or computational science, and the extent to which they will serve as leaders and role models to increase diversity in the workplace.

Of the eleven students named as winners this year, 90% identify as female, and 63% are underrepresented minorities in their country of study. They are pursuing MS and PhD degrees in a variety of applied fields:

·   Tassallah Abdullahi (PhD, NLP/Information Retrieval), Brown University

·   Jennifer Briggs (PhD, Bioengineering and Biomedical Informatics), University of Colorado, Anschutz Medical Campus

·   Navona Calarco (PhD, Medical Biophysics), University of Toronto

·   Leslie Cook (Master's, Computer Science), Midwestern State University

·   Draga Doncila Pop (PhD, IT), Monash University

·   Alexis Garretson (PhD, Genetics), Tufts University

·   Tobias Holden (PhD, Health & Biomedical Informatics), Northwestern University

·   Hellina Nigatu (PhD, Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences), University of California, Berkeley

·   Sonal Sannigrahi (Master's, Computational Linguistics), Saarland University

·   Ana Veroneze Solórzano (PhD, Computer Engineering), Northeastern University

·   Nicole Tomassi (PhD, Computational Neuroscience), Boston University

Funding will be awarded in August. The winners will be recognized during the awards ceremony at SC22. They will also receive a complimentary membership in SIGHPC for the duration of their fellowship.