Lori Diachin

After serving as ECP’s deputy director since 2018, Lori Diachin of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) succeeded Doug Kothe as the project’s director in June 2023.

In the director role, Diachin is shepherding ECP through to its conclusion, as the first generation of US exascale supercomputers tackles numerous modeling and simulation workloads utilizing Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Frontier and Argonne National Laboratory’s Aurora supercomputers for US Department of Energy Office of Science applications, and as LLNL’s El Capitan begins performing functions for National Nuclear Security Administration applications in 2024.

She served for 6 years as the director for the Center for Applied Scientific Computing (CASC) and 2 years as the acting Information Technology Department head. CASC houses approximately 125 applied mathematicians, computer scientists, and data scientists who conduct world-class, collaborative scientific research and development on problems critical to national security. The center’s core competencies include high-performance computing, computational physics, numerical mathematics, computer science, and data science.

Diachin has over 20 years’ experience in applied mathematics research, where her areas of expertise include mesh quality improvement, mesh component software, numerical methods, and parallel computing. Before joining LLNL, she was a computer scientist at Argonne and a member of the technical staff at Sandia National Laboratories. She received her bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Edinboro University of Pennsylvania in 1988 and her PhD in applied mathematics from the University of Virginia in 1992.