Dr. Ilkay Altintas

Biography

Ilkay Altintas is a research scientist and the Chief Data Science Officer at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, as well as a Founding Faculty Fellow at the Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute at the University of California San Diego. She serves as the Founding Director of the Workflows Data Science (WorDS) Center of Excellence and the WIFIRE Lab. The WorDS Center specializes in the development of methods, cyberinfrastructure, and workflows for computational data science, translating research into practical applications. The WIFIRE Lab focuses on artificial intelligence methods for all-hazards knowledge and cyberinfrastructure, serving as a management layer for data collection and modeling efforts aimed at wildfire management. Joining SDSC in 2001, she has been a principal investigator and technical leader on a wide range of cross-disciplinary projects. Her specialty in scientific workflows has led collaborative teams to deliver impactful results, making computational data science more reusable, programmable, scalable, and reproducible. Her work has been applied across various scientific and societal domains, including bioinformatics, geoinformatics, high-energy physics, multi-scale biomedical science, smart cities, and smart manufacturing. As a popular MOOC instructor in the field of big data science, she has reached more than a million learners across multiple continents. She has received several awards, including the 2015 IEEE TCSC Award for Excellence in Scalable Computing for Early Career Researchers and the 2017 ACM SIGHPC Emerging Woman Leader in Technical Computing Award.

Research Interests