Many virtual student internship programs across the national labs complex, industry, and academia are underway with students working remotely while geographically dispersed. What does a “virtual internship” lack, and what changes to mentoring or onboarding must be made? How can students get the most out of their internships—what opportunities should they look for, and how can they prepare for challenges? In the ninth installment of the panel discussion series, seasoned scientists offer career advice for students and early career scientists on weathering a pandemic, time management, and how to adjust to long-term changes while working remotely.

Panelists

• Dorian Arnold (Emory University)
• Rebecca Hartman-Baker (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory)
• Christine Harvey (The MITRE Corporation)
• Jay Lofstead (Sandia National Laboratories)

Moderators

• Ashley Barker (Oak Ridge National Laboratory)
• Elaine Raybourn (Sandia National Laboratories)

Panelist Bios

Dorian Arnold is an associate professor at Emory University studying large, distributed software systems. He has 60+ publications with ~2100 citations and two Top 100 R&D awards. In 2017, he was named an ACM Distinguished Speaker. Arnold has held leadership roles at major HPC venues, including SC, IPDPS, ICPP and served as an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems. He is committed to diversity, equity and inclusion with service including General Chair for the 2017 Tapia Conference and the 2016 CRA HPC Pipeline Workshop. Arnold’s PhD, MS, BS and AS are from the University of Wisconsin, University of Tennessee, Regis University (Denver, CO) and St. John’s College (Belize), respectively.

Rebecca Hartman-Baker leads the User Engagement Group at NERSC, where she is responsible for engagement with the NERSC user community to increase user productivity via advocacy, support, training, and the provisioning of usable computing environments. She worked as a postdoc and then as a scientific computing liaison in the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, and a senior supercomputing applications specialist at the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre in Australia before joining NERSC in 2015. She has mentored many students in her career, hosting summer interns ranging from high school students to graduate students. She is also a supporter of student cluster competitions; Rebecca trained two Australian teams and two all-female NERSC teams for the competitions, and chaired the Student Cluster Competition at SC19.

Christine Harvey is a Principal High Performance & Analytic Computing Architect at The MITRE Corporation. She specializes in data analysis and high performance computing (HPC) for simulations. Christine runs MITRE’s HPC clusters for internal research and leads data collection and analysis efforts for the simulation experiments (SIMEX) program. Christine completed her Bachelors and Masters in Computational Science from Stockton University and earned her PhD in Computational Science and Informatics from George Mason University. Christine is a member of the SC and WinterSim conference committees and is currently serving as treasurer for the Special Interest group on High Performance Computing (SIGHPC).

Jay Lofstead is is a Principal Member of Technical Staff in the Scalable System Software department of the Center for Computing Research in Albuquerque, NM. His work focuses on infrastructure to support all varieties of simulation, scientific, and engineering workflows with a strong emphasis on IO, middleware, storage, transactions, operating system features to support workflows, containers, software engineering and reproducibility. He is co-founder of the IO-500 storage list. He also works extensively to support various student mentoring and diversity programs at several venues each year including outreach to both high school and college students. Jay graduated with a BS, MS, and PhD in Computer Science from Georgia Institute of Technology and was a recipient of a 2013 R&D 100 award for his work on the ADIOS IO library.

Moderator Bios

Ashley Barker is the Section Head for Operations at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) located at Oak Ridge National Lab (ORNL). The Operations Section is responsible for facilitating access to OLCF resources, providing training, documentation, and technical support to users, collecting and reporting on user facility data, and acquainting the public with the work conducted at the OLCF through scientific highlights. The OLCF supports more than 1,200 users and 250 projects annually from a wide spectrum of science domains. Ashley served as the National Climate Research Center (NCRC) Project Director from 2014-2016. The NCRC project represents a partnership between NOAA and DOE and through this partnership, the NCRC team has delivered multiple computer systems to NOAA, allowing the agency to advance its climate modeling and improve our understanding of climate variability and change. Ashley is also currently involved in the Exascale Computing Project (ECP) as the Control Account Manager (CAM) for training and productivity.

Elaine Raybourn is a social scientist in the Statistics and Human Systems Group (Applied Cognitive Science) at Sandia National Laboratories. Her research focuses on virtual teams, software developer productivity, virtual environments, visualization, and transmedia learning. She is the SC21 Scientific Visualization & Data Analytics Showcase Chair. Elaine has worked remotely for a combined total of 14 years while at Sandia National Laboratories: from the UK as a guest researcher at British Telecom; Germany (Fraunhofer FIT) and France (INRIA) as a Fellow of the European Research Consortium in Informatics and Mathematics (ERCIM), and most recently from Orlando, Florida as Sandia’s Institutional PI for the IDEAS-ECP productivity project. Elaine leads PSIP and the panel series Strategies for Working Remotely.