Tony Baylis
Director, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Office
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Tony Baylis is a senior leader, partner, and international advocate for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI). He collaborates with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL)’s senior leadership on the organization’s DEI strategy and he leads the execution of building a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive lab culture and workforce. LLNL has increased the demographics of historically underrepresented groups in the STEM population at the lab by 6.7% over a seven-year period.
Tony’s career spans over 30 years of administrative, project, program, technical, organizational management and senior leadership in industry, academia, government, film and broadcast media, scientific and technical environments. He has worked with academia, government, industry, community, and diversity organization partners to build career pathways for underserved and marginalized populations. He represents LLNL on the subjects of DEI, science, engineering, arts, and mathematics (STEAM), outreach, and K-12 student programs.
He has mentored over 200 students and professionals throughout his career.
Jeffrey Larson
Computational Mathematician
Argonne National Laboratory
Jeffrey Larson is a computational mathematician in the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at Argonne National Laboratory. He is lead developer for libEnsemble, a Python library to coordinate the concurrent evaluation of dynamic ensembles of calculations. Jeffrey researches algorithms for mathematical optimization that are motivated by real-world applications from areas including particle accelerator design and quantum computing. His current research focuses on the theoretical properties of algorithms for derivative-free optimization and efficiently implementing such methods on world-class high-performance computers. His interests also include scheduling algorithms and vehicle platoon routing. Jeffrey is co-chair of the Argonne ACT-SO High School Research Program, a STEM-enrichment program that partners with the DuPage County NAACP chapter to pair ANL scientists with Chicago-area African-American high school students. He has also taught courses at the graduate and undergraduate levels, including courses at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden and the International College of Beijing.
Tanzima Islam
Assistant Professor of Computer Science
Texas State University
Tanzima Islam is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at Texas State University. Dr. Islam earned her Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from Purdue University and was a postdoctoral scholar at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). Her research develops software tools and data-driven analysis techniques to automatically identify performance problems of scientific applications running on High-Performance Computing (HPC) systems and mitigate them. The impact of her research on improving application performance has been recognized nationally and internationally through awards such as the R&D 100 award, Science and Technology award from LLNL, and the College of Science and Engineering’s Excellence in Scholarly Activities at Texas State. Dr. Islam’s research has been funded by national labs and the industry such as DOE, LLNL, AMD. She is also a DOE Sustainable Research Pathways fellow. Additionally, she is the co-founder of the first research and mentoring platform in Bangladesh–BWCSE (https://bwcse.wordpress.com)–that provides research and career development training to female students in Computer Science and Engineering.
Alphonso Thomas
Director of Engineering and Technical Management
Air Force Sustainment Center, Tinker Air Force Base
Alphonso Thomas, a member of the Senior Executive Service, is the Director of Engineering and Technical Management at the Air Force Sustainment Center, Tinker Air Force Base, Oklahoma. He is responsible for the development, implementation and oversight of the Center’s technical policies, processes, databases and goals/standards as well as the overall scientific and engineering expertise for the AFSC. Mr. Thomas is responsible for leadership and technical direction to a technical workforce of more than 4,500 science and engineering professionals supporting the center’s mission at three locations (Robins AFB, Georgia; Hill AFB, Utah; and Tinker AFB) and encompassing depot maintenance, repair and overhaul activities, supply chain management, and software maintenance and development enterprise.
Mr. Thomas began his professional career as an officer in the U.S. Air Force, managing space and missile warning acquisition programs, including the Defense Support Program and the Cheyenne Mountain Upgrade Program. He began his civil service career at the Warner Robins Air Logistics Center leading development and test of software sustainment and upgrades for the B-1 Bomber and Electronic Attack pods. He later served as Chief Engineer, Information Directorate, Air Force Research Laboratory, Rome, N.Y., where he was responsible for development and implementation of tailored systems engineering and program management processes across the directorate’s broad portfolio of Command, Control, Communications, Cyber and Intelligence Science and Technology programs. Mr. Thomas was Director of the 402nd Software Maintenance Group, Warner Robins Air Logistics Complex, Robins AFB, where he directed an organization of 1150 engineers, computer scientists and technical and support staff, conducting development, test and integration of operational flight programs, test program sets and Intelligence,Surveillance & Reconnaissance applications for a wide variety of Air Force weapon systems and networks.
Moderator: Suzanne Parete-Koon
HPC Engineer at Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility
Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Suzanne Parete-Koon is an HPC Engineer at Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility with a background in computational astrophysics (PhD 2008, Univ of Tennessee, Knoxville). She has experience leading user support activities at both the OLCF and ORNL’s Spallation Neutron Source. She was the Deputy INCITE program manager from 2015-2018, and she is currently the training lead for OLCF. She leads the Exascale Computing Project’s Workforce Development and Retention Action Group. Suzanne is excited about the opportunity to facilitate a dialog about building an inclusive High Performance Computing work environment and workforce.
