Berkeley Lab and NERSC Staff Honored with Six Director’s Awards for Exceptional Achievement

October 10, 2023

Three Director’s Awards for Exceptional Achievement will be awarded to the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at an awards ceremony held at 3 p.m. PST, Wednesday, November 8, in Berkeley Lab’s 50 Auditorium. The event will also be live-streamed.

The Director’s Awards program recognizes the significant achievements of Lab employees. Each year, these awards are given for accomplishments, leadership, collaboration, multi-disciplinary science, cross-divisional projects, and commitment to excellence supporting the Lab’s mission and strategic goals.

IDEA Award – Mentorship

Deb Agarwal, Ann Almgren, Lisa Claus, Rebecca Hartman-Baker, and Susan Lucas

Left to right: Deb Agarwal, Ann Almgren, Lisa Claus, Rebecca Hartman-Baker, and Susan Lucas.

This year, 27 researchers across the Lab were recognized for their significant efforts to foster belonging and access to opportunities for career advancement for employees regardless of background.

Among those honored for building the critical foundations of a complex mentoring ecosystem that fulfills different employee needs around mentorship while also modeling the value of team science and cross-lab collaboration over three years are Computing Sciences’ Deb Agarwal (former SciData Division Director), Ann Almgren (AMCR), Lisa Claus (NERSC), Rebecca Hartman-Baker (NERSC), and Susan Lucas (ESnet).

Scientific

The Superfacility Team

Collage image with 24 headshots of Berkeley Lab CS Director's Award Winners for their contributions to Superfacility.

A group of cross-division researchers, computer scientists, and engineers were honored for developing and demonstrating the revolutionary Superfacility concept, coupling high performance computing, networking, services, and tools with a range of experimental and observational science facilities spanning multiple science domains. NERSC’s William Arndt, Debbie Bard, Johannes Blaschke, Shane Canon, Ravi Cheema, Bjoern Enders, Lisa Gerhardt, Annette Greiner, Doug Jacobsen, Stefan Lasiewski, Jason Lee, Kelly Rowland, Chris Samuel, Ashwin Selvarajan, David Skinner (posthumous), Cory Snavely, Laurie Stephey, Rollin Thomas, Gabor Torok, and Becci Totzke worked with SciData’s Shreyas Cholia and Alex Sim and ESnet’s Chin Guok, Damian Hazen, and Xi Yang on the award-winning project.

Scientific

WarpX Team

The WarpX team, which includes Ann Almgren (AMCR), John Bell (AMCR), Arianna Formenti (ATAP), Marco Garten (ATAP), Kevin Gott (NERSC), Junmin Gu (SciData), Axel Huebl (ATAP), Revathi Jambunathan (AMCR), Hannah Klion (AMCR), Prabhat Kumar (AMCR), Remi Lehe (ATAP), Andrew Myers (AMCR), Ryan Sandberg (ATAP), Olga Shapoval (ATAP), Jean-Luc Vay (ATAP), Weiqun Zhang (AMCR), Edoardo Zoni (ATAP), was recognized for developing an innovative accelerator modeling development code, WarpX, which pushed forward the state-of-the-art in algorithmic innovation and high performance computing at exascale, achievements made in the Berkeley Lab tradition of team science.

Last year, the team also received the prestigious Gordon Bell Prize for their work in advancing the design of particle accelerators.

About NERSC and Berkeley Lab
The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) is a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science User Facility that serves as the primary high performance computing center for scientific research sponsored by the Office of Science. Located at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, NERSC serves almost 10,000 scientists at national laboratories and universities researching a wide range of problems in climate, fusion energy, materials science, physics, chemistry, computational biology, and other disciplines. Berkeley Lab is a DOE national laboratory located in Berkeley, California. It conducts unclassified scientific research and is managed by the University of California for the U.S. Department of Energy. »Learn more about computing sciences at Berkeley Lab.