İlkay Altıntaş (SDSC, UC San Diego) is a research scientist at the University of California San Diego, the Chief Data Science Officer of the San Diego Supercomputer Center, and a Founding Fellow of the Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute within the School of Computing, Information, and Data Science. Specializing in scientific workflows, scalable computing and data systems, her research enables collaborative teams to deliver impactful results and sustainable solutions by making computational data science and AI more reusable, programmable, scalable, accessible, and reproducible. She is the Founding Director of the Societal Computing and Innovation Lab, which focuses on novel approaches to creating breakthrough technological innovations that address complex scientific and societal challenges. Her work has been applied to many domains including bioinformatics, geoinformatics, high-energy physics, material science, multi-scale biomedical science, smart cities, and smart manufacturing. She is also the Founder of the WIFIRE Program for wildland fire innovations and the Principal Investigator of the NSF National Data Platform, the Wildfire Science and Technology Commons, and other diverse grants that advance scalable computing, AI, and data systems across the digital continuum from edge to HPC. Her honors include the 2015 IEEE TCSC Award for Excellence in Scalable Computing for Early Career Researchers and the 2017 ACM SIGHPC Emerging Woman Leader in Technical Computing Award. She serves on the elected Board of Governors for the IEEE Computer Society and was appointed by California Governor Gavin Newsom to the Wildfire Technology Research and Development Review Advisory Board. Ilkay received her Ph.D. from the University of Amsterdam.
Amy Apon has been a Program Director in the Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure since January 2023. She is the lead Program Director for the Campus Cyberinfrastructure program. Apon joined NSF through the Intergovernmental Personnel Act in January 2023 from Clemson University. At Clemson, she served as Chair of the Computer Science Division and later as Director of the School of Computing. She holds a PhD in Computer Science from Vanderbilt University and conducts research in parallel and distributed computing systems.
Ben Brown is the Director of the Facilities Division in the Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) program in the DOE Office of Science, an $780M portfolio encompassing DOE’s high performance computing, networking, and data user facilities and major projects for open science. In this role Ben is also part of the HQ leadership team implementing the Genesis Mission, and the architect of DOE’s Integrated Research Infrastructure (IRI) initiative. Among other previous roles, Ben served as the federal program manager for ESnet from 2017-2021 and for the DOE Project Leadership Institute from 2014-2022. He is a Ph.D. physicist by background with specialization in optical physics and quantum information science.
Stephen Deems is Director, Research Infrastructure Operations at Internet2, supporting the transformation of community needs into operational research infrastructure services that advance Internet2’s mission within the national cyberinfrastructure ecosystem. He has more than 13 years of experience in managing complex, large-scale, and high-impact initiatives in advanced cyberinfrastructure, life sciences, data management, and artificial intelligence across the NSF and NIH funding landscape.
Prior to joining Internet2 in 2026, he served as Director of Strategic Initiatives at Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center within Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) after leading their project management team. He most recently served as the Principal Investigator for the NSF-funded ACCESS Allocations Service award and was the Allocations Team lead for the National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource (NAIRR) Pilot. He has received funding from the U.S. Department of Defense in collaboration with CMU’s AirLab to advance autonomous robot research.
Parag Deotare, Ph.D. is Chen-Luan Family Faculty Development Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Associate Professor of Applied Physics at University of Michigan. Dr. Deotare directs the Excitonics and Photonics Laboratory (ExP Lab), which focuses on understanding and manipulating exciton dynamics (including energy transport) in low dimensional materials such as transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs), organic semiconductors, and the hybrid interfaces for applications in on-chip data communication and processing, quantum metrology and quantum information science and engineering. The lab engages in collaborative, multi and interdisciplinary research to bridge knowledge and cutting-edge approaches from the fields of quantum optics, semiconductor physics, nanophotonics, excitonics, and material science. He is a recipient of the Young Investigator Award from the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research in 2017 and the HKN Professor of the Year Award in 2017 at the University of Michigan. Before joining the University of Michigan in 2016, he was a postdoctoral associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 2012.
Dr. Sandra Gesing is a Senior Researcher at the San Diego Supercomputer Center and the Executive Director of the US Research Software Engineer Association. Her research focuses on science gateways, computational workflows as well as distributed and parallel computing which inherently leads to highly interdisciplinary projects. She is especially interested in sustainability of research software, usability of computational methods and reproducibility of research results and she supports open science initiatives. Prior to the position at DPI, she was an associate research professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering and a computational scientist in the Center for Research Computing at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, US. Before she moved to the US, she was a research associate in the Data-Intensive Research Group at the University of Edinburgh, UK, in the area of data-intensive workflows and in the Applied Bioinformatics Group at the University of Tübingen, Germany, in the area of science gateways and grid computing. Additionally, she has perennial experience as a project manager and system developer in industry. As head of a system programmer group, she has led long-term software projects (e.g. infrastructure on web-based applications). She received her German diploma in computer science from extramural studies at the FernUniversität Hagen and her PhD in computer science from the University of Tübingen, Germany.
Since 1983 Miron Livny has been on the Computer Sciences Department faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he is currently the John P. Morgridge Professor of Computer Science and a Vilas Research Professor. He serves as the director of the Center for High Throughput Computing (CHTC), is leading the HTCondor Software Suite effort and serves as the technical director of the OSG. He is a member of the scientific leadership team of the Morgridge Institute of Research where he leads the Research Computing theme.
Dr. Livny’s research focuses on distributed processing and object management systems and involves close collaboration with researchers from a wide spectrum of disciplines. He pioneered the area of High Throughput Computing (HTC) and developed frameworks and software tools that have been widely adopted by academic, government and commercial organizations around the world.
Dr. Livny is the recipient of the 2006 ACM SIGMOD Test of Time Award, the 2013 HPDC Achievement Award, the 2020 IEEE TCDP Outstanding Technical Achievement Award, the 2020 IEEE TCDP High Impact Paper Award and the 2023 UW-Madison Vilas Research Professor award.
Miron Livny received a BSc degree in Physics and Mathematics in 1975 from the Hebrew University and MSc and PhD degrees in Computer Science from the Weizmann Institute of Science in 1978 and 1984, respectively.
William (Bill) Miller is the Senior Director for Research Computing and Data for the University of Utah. In this role, he provides leadership, strategic direction, and execution for the University’s expanding research computing and data capabilities. His portfolio includes directing the 45-person Center for High Performance Computing (CHPC), expanding public-private partnerships on Artificial Intelligence infrastructure, and engaging broadly across the state, regionally and nationally, to advance discovery and innovation.
Bill is an engineer and scientist with careers in industry, academia, and government. As an engineer, he contributed to major manned and unmanned space missions at NASA and abroad. Interest in artificial neural networks led him to experimental neuroscience in which field he conducted research into the neural correlates of perception in the U.S. and Europe. Bill then joined the U.S. National Science Foundation, where he held program and management appointments across the agency, most recently as Senior Advisor in the NSF Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure (OAC) which included orchestrating the National AI Research Resource (NAIRR) Pilot. Bill also served an extended detail to the Department of Energy as Senior Technical Advisor in the Office of Science, where he co-led the Integrated Research Infrastructure (IRI) Architecture Blueprint Activity and oversaw deployment of the Perlmutter petascale computing resource at DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Bill holds a B.S.E in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Michigan and a Ph.D. in Neuroscience at the University of California-Davis.
Dr. Christopher S. Simmons is Cambridge Computer Services’ Scientist in Residence, responsible for providing thought leadership for clients and cultivating relationships in our industry. He has over 25 years of experience in all facets of computational science and high performance computing. Christopher earned his PhD from the University of Texas at Austin in physical chemistry with an emphasis in computational quantum mechanics. He was the former Project Lead for OpenHPC and now heads up outreach activities for the project.
Monica VanDieren is a senior technical marketing engineer at NVIDIA. She leads the CUDA-Q Academic initiative, collaborating with universities worldwide to develop educational resources that offer practical, hands-on experience with hybrid quantum-classical computing. Prior to NVIDIA, she worked at IBM Quantum, creating training materials for enterprise clients. Monica holds a PhD in Mathematical Sciences from Carnegie Mellon University’s Pure and Applied Logic Program. With over 20 years of experience in academia, she has held positions at Stanford, the University of Michigan, and Robert Morris University.
Dr. James Barr von Oehsen directs the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC), a joint facility of the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University, where he holds leadership positions as Vice Chancellor for Research Computing at Pitt and Senior Advisor for Research Computing and Data at CMU. Previously at Rutgers University, he now provides strategic direction for PSC as a national research resource supporting both academic and industry endeavors. His NSF and NIH-funded research focuses on secure federated research and data platforms, advanced computing and networking, and workforce development. Beyond his administrative roles, he maintains research professor appointments in electrical and computer engineering at both universities and biomedical informatics at Pitt. As a founding member of the Ecosystem for Research Networking (ERN) and the Keystone AI + Quantum Factory, he works to facilitate multi-institutional academic collaborations to advance research and innovation