Melyssa Fratkin
Industrial Programs Director
Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC)

This talented young professional hails from a lineage of leaders in High Performance Computing and academia. Dedicated to her work in academic HPC for most of her professional career, Ms. Fratkin is considered by many to be one the young "up and comers" in the supercomputing community. As one of the highly regarded women emerging as part of the next wave of leaders in her field, we are looking forward to seeing even more of her contributions in the months and years ahead.

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As Industrial Programs Director for the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at The University of Texas at Austin, Ms. Fratkin oversees TACC's corporate partnerships and government relations activities with focus on developing and managing strong relationships between industry and academia with the Science & Technology Affiliates for Research (STAR) program. In her spare time, she manages the mentoring program for 'Blue Knot', Austin's Jewish Technology initiative, and supports programs that promote STEM education for girls and young women.

Hailing from the Washington, D.C. area, Ms. Fratkin has also done considerable heavy lifting behind the scenes on behalf of the Coalition for Academic Scientific Computation (CASC), an educational nonprofit organization representing many of the nation's most forward thinking universities and computing centers.

Previously, she served as Policy Director for the High Performance Computing Project at the Council on Competitiveness, where she worked to foster government-university-industry partnerships and to publicize the need for high performance computing to foster continued innovation in the United States. Ms. Fratkin also worked as a consultant to CASC, where she tracked networking, technology and information security issues arising in Congress and the federal agencies.

Prior to working with CASC, she served as International Development Coordinator for the AMPATH project, where she managed the outreach program to engage international agencies and regional projects in support of advanced networking for research and education in Latin America and the Caribbean.

This year, Ms. Fratkin and the STAR program will focus in particular on two segments that are vital to Austin and the state of Texas. In the energy sector, companies will be invited to use the new Lonestar supercomputing system for breakthrough research projects; and in advanced computing (where Austin is arguably one of the nation's leaders in technology development) for new collaborations and training programs intended to raise the bar for the entire community.

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.

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