Kjiersten Fagnan to Report on Vibrant JGI-NERSC Collaboration

Fifteen years ago, the Joint Genome Institute (JGI) and NERSC formed a partnership to support the exponentially increasing scale of genomics data generation. That partnership has led to close collaborations on data management, high-performance computing, and complex workflow deployments that have been foundational to JGI's efforts in resilient, distributed computing. On July 22 at 1:30 p.m. PDT on Zoom, JGI Chief Informatics Officer Kjiersten Fagnan will discuss this vibrant collaboration—past successes, scientific discoveries, and the NESAP-IRI Pathfinder project—as part of the NERSC@50 seminar series.

Kjiersten Fagnan began working with JGI in 2012 as a NERSC bioinformatics computing consultant, after completing a petascale postdoctoral fellowship at NERSC and Berkeley Lab’s Computational Research Division. As a postdoc, her research focused on stable and accurate computational methods for reacting subsurface flows, and evolved into scalable methods for scientific data analysis. In 2014 she became the JGI-NERSC Engagement Lead, with a focus on adapting JGI workloads to run on supercomputing hardware, and worked closely with staff to understand the data-intensive nature of JGI workloads. Fagnan was appointed CIO of JGI in 2016 and in 2018 became the JGI’s Data Science and Informatics department head. In 2018, she was part of the Gordon Bell Prize-winning team at the Supercomputing conference (SC18) led by researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. She has been the Distinguished Speaker at IBM Research in Almaden, where she presented work related to distributed data and workflow management. Fagnan is also a co-PI for the National Microbiome Data Collaborative, where she leads infrastructure and user-centered design efforts.

NERSC@50 seminars are held remotely on Zoom and open to Berkeley Lab staff, NERSC users, and the public.