HPCwire Names TACC's Melyssa Fratkin as one of the 2011 "People to Watch"
AUSTIN, Texas--HPCwire has released its "People to Watch" list for 2011, an annual listing of individuals who are contributing to the practical advancements of HPC technology and usage.
This year, the list includes Melyssa Fratkin, Industrial Programs Director at TACC. Ms. Fratkin oversees TACC's corporate partnerships and government relations activities, including the Science and Technology Affiliates for Research (STAR) program. In the coming year, Ms. Fratkin and the STAR program will focus on two segments that are vital to Austin and the state of Texas: energy and advanced computing research and development.
"We hope to collaborate with the energy companies on a variety of projects from more accurate seismic and reservoir modeling to extract more oil and natural gas from existing wells, to the molecular dynamics of experimental alternative energy sources," Ms. Fratkin said.
In addition, Austin is one of the nation's leaders in advanced computing technology research and development. TACC works closely with well-known companies such as Dell, Intel and Advanced Micro Devices, as well as smaller companies like Green Revolution Computing, finding solutions for the challenges facing the industry on the march toward petascale computing. In the coming year, Ms. Fratkin will use these connections to help build a skilled workforce that will expand the HPC research and development community in Central Texas.
Previously, Ms. Fratkin worked for the Coalition for Academic Scientific Computation (CASC), an educational nonprofit organization in Washington D.C. The organization represents more than 60 of the nation's major research universities and advanced computing centers. Ms. Fratkin also served as Policy Director for the High Performance Computing Project at the Council on Competitiveness, where she worked to foster government, university and industry partnerships as well as publicize the need for high performance computing to drive continued innovation in the United States.
"Working for CASC and the Council on Competitiveness gave me a deep understanding of what the HPC systems do, and why they're so important to basic science. Every minute of our lives, we interact with something that has been touched in some way by HPC," Ms. Fratkin said.
The passion for HPC runs in the family. As the CASC Washington Liaison, her mother, Sue Fratkin, is a regular at the annual Supercomputing conferences, congressional hearings on computational science, and other industry events. They are proud to be the only mother-daughter team in supercomputing.
Ms. Fratkin received her BA in Spanish from Rutgers University and her MBA in eCommerce from the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland. In her spare time, she manages the mentoring program for "Blue Knot," Austin's Jewish Technology initiative, and supports programs that promote Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education for girls and young women.
Date Posted: 2011-01-27 Faith Singer-Villalobos
