Dr. Michela Taufer

Michela Taufer, PhD

• MathWorks Professor
• Director, Global Computing Laboratory (GCLab)
• AAAS Fellow
• ACM Distinguished Scientist
• IEEE Senior Member
• IBM Faculty Award (2019, 2021)
• Editor-in-Chief, Future Generation Computer Systems (FGCS)
• Associate Editor, Parallel Computing (ParCo)
• Associate Editor, IEEE Computing in Science & Engineering (CiSE)

Michela Taufer is the Founder and Director of the Global Computing Laboratory (GCLab), an AAAS Fellow, and an ACM Distinguished Scientist, and she holds the MathWorks Professorship in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (UTK). Before joining UTK, she was a Professor of Computer and Information Sciences and a J.P. Morgan Case Scholar at the University of Delaware, where she also held a joint appointment in the Biomedical Engineering Department and the Bioinformatics Program. She earned her undergraduate degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Padova (Italy) and her doctoral degree in Computer Science from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich, Switzerland). From 2003 to 2004, she was a La Jolla Interfaces in Science (LJIS) Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) and The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI), where she worked on interdisciplinary projects spanning computer systems and computational chemistry.

Michela Taufer has a long history of interdisciplinary research and leadership in collaboration with high-profile computational science and data-intensive research groups across academia, national laboratories, and scientific facilities. Her research focuses on high-performance computing, data-centric and AI-enabled workflows, reproducibility and performance analysis, and scalable software systems for heterogeneous architectures, including multi-core platforms, GPUs, and cloud-HPC–converged environments. She has served as principal investigator and co-principal investigator on numerous NSF and DOE collaborative projects, leading multi-institutional teams that bridge computer science with domain sciences. Michela has extensive experience mentoring students and early-career researchers, with a strong emphasis on interdisciplinary training, reproducible research practices, and broadening participation. Her education and training activities aim to lower barriers to access to advanced cyberinfrastructure, expand undergraduate and graduate engagement in HPC, data, and AI, and foster pathways into computational and data-driven science.

Michela Taufer has served on numerous IEEE program committees, including SC and IPDPS, and has reviewed for many of the leading journals in parallel and high-performance computing. She served as General Chair of SC19 (The International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis), General Chair of IEEE IPDPS 2017, and General Co-Chair of IEEE Cluster 2015. She is currently Editor-in-Chief of Future Generation Computer Systems (FGCS) and serves as Associate Editor for Parallel Computing (ParCo) and IEEE Computing in Science & Engineering (CiSE).

You can find more about Michela's research-, education-, and service activities in her long vitae (pdf format).

Research Interests

• High-performance computing and scalable software systems
• Scientific applications and their programmability on multi-core, many-core, and accelerator-based platforms
• Numerical reproducibility, stability, and performance variability in parallel and multithreaded applications
• Performance analysis, modeling, and optimization of multi-scale and data-intensive applications
• Data-centric, AI-enabled, and workflow-driven scientific computing
• Cloud–HPC convergence and elastic computing environments
• Large-scale data analytics and management for scientific discovery

Education

Positions