SDSC Summer Institute Instructors
Ilkay Altintas, Ph.D.
SDSC | Chief Data Science Officer and Lab Director, Scientific Workflow Automation Technologies
Since joining SDSC in 2001, Ilkay Altintas has worked on different aspects of scientific workflows as a principal investigator and in other leadership roles across a wide range of cross-disciplinary NSF, DOE and Moore Foundation projects. She is a co-initiator of and an active contributor to the open-source Kepler Scientific Workflow System, and the co-author of publications related to eScience at the intersection of scientific workflows, provenance, distributed computing, bioinformatics, observatory systems, conceptual data querying, and software modeling. Ilkay Altintas received her Ph.D. degree from the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands with an emphasis on provenance of workflow-driven collaborative science.
Amit Chourasia
SDSC | Senior Visualization Scientist
Amit Chourasia leads the Visualization Services group at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC). His work is focused on research, development and application of software tools and techniques for visualization. Key portion of his work is to find ways to represent data in a visual form that is clear, succinct and accurate - a challenging yet very exciting endeavor.
Andreas Goetz, Ph.D.
SDSC | Research Scientist, Principal Investigator
Andreas Goetz leads the computational chemistry efforts at SDSC, working at the intersection of (bio)chemistry, physics, and high performance and data intensive computing. He is a contributing author to the ADF quantum chemistry software and the AMBER software package for biomolecular simulations, both widely used in academic and industrial research. Andreas collaborates on a variety of research projects in molecular simulation, computational enzymology and drug design with support from NSF, DOE, NIH, Intel and Nvidia. Andreas also enjoys training the next generation of scientists in software engineering and numerical simulation methods via lectures, workshops and supervision of interns. He is author of over 40 scientific publications and editor of the book 'Electronic structure calculations on GPUs'. Prior to joining SDSC in 2009 Andreas performed postdoctoral research at the VU University in Amsterdam and obtained his undergraduate and Ph.D. degrees in chemistry from the University of Erlangen in Germany.
Mai H Nguyen, Ph.D.
SDSC | Lead for Data Analytics
Mai Nguyen has extensive industry and academic experience in machine learning, data mining, business intelligence, data warehousing, and software design & development. She is a data scientist at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), where she works on combining machine learning algorithms with distributed computing to process large-scale data. She has worked in many application areas, including remote sensing, personalized medicine, image analysis, and speech recognition. She has M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from UCSD, with focus on machine learning and artificial intelligence.
Paul Rodriguez, Ph.D.
SDSC | Research Analyst
Paul Rodriguez received his PhD in Cognitive Science at University of California, San Diego (UCSD) in 1999. He spent several years doing research in neural network modeling, dynamical systems simulations, time series analysis, and statistical methods for analysis and predictions in fMRI data. He has more recently worked in data mining for health care fraud identification, and optimization of data intensive network flow models.
Manu Shantharam, Ph.D.
SDSC | Senior Computational Scientist
Manu Shantharam is a Senior Computational Research Scientist in the San Diego Supercomputer Center. Manu received his Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from The Pennsylvania State University in 2012. His research interests include performance analysis of HPC applications, sparse scientific computations, scheduling HPC workloads, and resiliency in HPC.
Robert Sinkovits, Ph.D.
SDSC | Director for Scientific Computing Applications
Robert Sinkovits, Ph.D. leads the scientific applications efforts at the San Diego Supercomputer Center. He has collaborated with researchers spanning a large number of fields including physics, chemistry, astronomy, structural biology, finance and the social sciences, always with an emphasis on making the most effective use of high end computing resources. Before returning to SDSC, he was the primary developer of the AUTO3DEM and IHRSR++ software packages used for solving the structures of icosahedral and helical macromolecular structures, respectively. He has approximately 50 journal publications, book chapters and conference proceedings. He is also an avid cyclist and mountain climber, having summited nearly 300 peaks.
Subhashini Sivagnanam
SDSC | Senior Computational and Data Science Specialist
Subhashini Sivagnanam is the Co-PI and the main software architect of the Neuroscience Gateway (NSG). She works for the Data Enabled Scientific Computing division at the San Diego Supercomputer Center as a senior computational and data science specialist. She has worked on various high performance computing projects since 2005. She received a M.S. in Computer Engineering from the North Carolina State University in 2004. She is a member of the Society for Neuroscience and the Organization for Computational Neurosciences.
Mahidhar Tatineni, Ph.D.
SDSC | Director, User Services
Mahidhar Tatineni received his M.S. & Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering from UCLA. He currently leads the User Services group at SDSC and has done many optimization and parallelization projects on the supercomputing resources including Gordon and Comet.
Mary Thomas, Ph.D.
SDSC | Computational Scientist
Mary Thomas is a member of the Data Enabled Scientific Computing (DESC) division. Mary holds a Ph.D. in computational science, and M.S. degrees in computer science and physics. Her research interests include HPC computing, coastal ocean modeling, cyberinfrastructure & web technologies, and AWS-based cloud computing. For fun, Mary has sponsored 2 teams for the annual student cluster competitions at SC. For more information, see <https://thomas.sdsu.edu>.
Rick Wagner
Globus | Globus Professional Services manager
Rick Wagner is the Globus Professional Services manager, managing a team of engineers supporting organizations and research projects in solving large-scale and complex data management challenges. He was the HPC Systems Manager at the San Diego Supercomputer Center and Rick starting point in research was computational astrophysics.
Nicole Wolter
SDSC | Computational and Data Science Research Specialist
Nicole Wolter has over 10 years of experience in high performance computing. She has spent six years doing research in Performance Modeling and Characterization at UC San Diego. She has excellent analytical and model development skills most recently applied in the areas of medical informatics, sports analytics and large data analysis. She has conducted a number of data mining classes and lectures.
Andrea Zonca, Ph.D.
SDSC | Senior Computational Scientist
Andrea Zonca has a background in Cosmology, he has been working on analyzing Cosmic Microwave Background data from the Planck Satellite. In order to manage and analyze large datasets, he developed expertise in parallel programming in Python and C++. At SDSC he helps research groups in any field of science to port their data analysis pipelines to XSEDE supercomputers. Andrea is also a certified Software Carpentry instructor.