HPCwire: Cecilia Aragon Honored with Presidential Early Career Award

The Leading Source for Global News and Information Covering the Ecosystem of High Productivity Computing

HPCwire >> Topic >> Visualization

July 09, 2009

Cecilia Aragon Honored with Presidential Early Career Award

Page: 1 of 2
1 | 2 All »

BERKELEY, Calif., July 9 -- Cecilia Aragon, staff scientist in the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's (Berkeley Lab) Computational Research Division (CRD), was honored with the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the U.S. government's most prestigious award for early-career scientists. Award winners were announced in a White House press release on Thursday, July 9, 2009.

The award recognized Aragon's groundbreaking research in data-intensive scientific workflow management, and pioneering development of innovative methods for visualization, analysis, and organization of massive scientific data sets, which will be critical to the success of the Department of Energy (DOE) mission.

She was also praised for her dedication to community service. Over the years, Aragon has led multiple efforts to advance diversity in computing both within the Berkeley Lab and in the broader community; she is a founding member of Latinas in Computing. In her spare time, Aragon also volunteers to teach and mentor young mathematics, science and engineering students from eighth grade through graduate levels.

Established in 1996, PECASE honors the most promising researchers in the nation within their fields. Nine federal departments and agencies, including the DOE, annually nominate scientists and engineers who are at the start of their independent careers and whose work shows exceptional promise for leadership at the frontiers of scientific knowledge. Participating agencies award these talented scientists and engineers with up to five years of funding to further their research in support of critical government missions.
Aragon's Berkeley Lab career began in 2005, as lead software architect for Sunfall, a collaborative visual analytics system developed for the Nearby Supernova Factory, an international astrophysics experiment and the largest data volume supernova search currently in operation. Her innovative ideas in image processing and machine learning algorithms, together with the application of novel human-computer interaction methods, helped the team increase project efficiency in some areas by nearly 90 percent. This work earned her a best paper award.

At the moment, Aragon is leading efforts to create computing systems for the Particle Data Group's Review of Particle Physics, the most cited publication in the field, as well as Deep Sky, an astronomical database covering the majority of the northern sky in unprecedented depth.

Before coming to Berkeley Lab, Aragon was a computer scientist at the NASA Ames Research Center and CEO of Top Flight Aviation, where she was an air show and test pilot and aerobatic champion. In 2004, she earned a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley, and before that a Bachelor of Science degree in mathematics from the California Institute of Technology.

She has authored or co-authored 33 peer-reviewed publications and over 100 other publications in computer science and astrophysics. Since earning her Ph.D. five years ago, she has received four Best Paper awards at major computer science conferences, and has given over 40 invited talks.

Earlier this year, Aragon was also honored as one of Hispanic Business magazine's 25 Women of Vision in 2009. The magazine is one of the premier business publications for the Hispanic market, with a primary circulation of 265,000 and a total audience of more than one million readers.

About Berkeley Lab

Berkeley Lab is a U.S. Department of Energy national laboratory located in Berkeley, Calif. It conducts unclassified scientific research and is managed by the University of California. Learn more at http://www.lbl.gov.

Page: 1 of 2
1 | 2 All »

Article Tools

Share Options

(Digg, Technorati, more)

Subscribe

Subscribe to HPCwire

Discussion

There are 0 discussion items posted.

Join the Discussion

You must be a registered user in order to comment on HPCwire stories.

Members enjoy:

	Access to Special Content, including Podcasts, Webcasts, and Whitepapers and more!
	Ability to take an active role in the discussions that are shaping the HPC technology discipline!
	Special offers available only to HPCwire members!

Become a Registered User Today!

Registered Users Log in Here to Comment

Email Address:	Password (case sensitive)

Remember me	Forgot Password?

RSS Feeds

Feeds by Topic

Feeds by Industry

Feeds by Content Type

Feature Articles

The Week in Review

C-DAC announces plans for a petaflop system; IBM researchers are working on vertical integration techniques to extend Moore's Law another 15 years. We recap those stories and more in our weekly wrapup.
Read More...

Moscow State University Supercomputer Has Petaflop Aspirations

The Moscow State University supercomputer, Lomonosov, has been selected for a high-performance makeover, with the goal of tripling its processing power to achieve petaflop-level performance in 2010. T-Platforms, who developed and manufactured the supercomputer, is the odds-on favorite to lead the project.
Read More...

Intel Ups Performance Ante with Westmere Server Chips

Right on schedule, Intel has launched its Xeon 5600 processors, codenamed "Westmere EP." The 5600 represents the 32nm sequel to the Xeon 5500 (Nehalem EP) for dual-socket servers. Intel is touting better performance and energy efficiency, along with new security features, as the big selling points of the new Xeons.
Read More...

Read more HPCwire features...

Top Headlines

Intel Partners See 'Easy' Upgrade Path With Xeon 5600 Chips

Mar 18 | ChannelWeb | Westmere parts already showing up in HPC machines. Read more...

AMD: OEMs primed for Opteron 6100s

Mar 17 | The Register | But what about the tier ones? Read more...

Arrival of the Desktop Supercomputer

Mar 17 | Cadalyst Magazine | A new generation of workstations is changing the nature of technical computing. Read more...

Scheduling HPC In The Cloud

Mar 17 | Linux Magazine | Latest iteration of Sun Grid Engine able to tap into Cloud. Read more...

Tailoring Medicine with Supercomputers

Mar 16 | Bio-IT World | Biotech firm builds genetic models from patient data. Read more...

Read more headlines...

Featured Whitepapers

Virtualization for Aggregation And The vSMP Architecture™

Jan 12 | | In-depth look at vSMP Foundation server virtualization technology, technical implementation, use cases and capabilities. The technical whitepaper provides an architectural overview and details on the three vSMP Foundation products: vSMP Foundation for SMP, vSMP Foundation for Cluster and vSMP Foundation for Cloud.

Copper Cable Technologies for High Performance Computing

Jan 18 | | This white paper discusses Gore’s copper cable assemblies, and how they continue to exceed the standards for providing reliable, cost-effective solutions for high-performance computer applications.

View the White Paper Library

Multimedia

Webcast: Virtualized Data Center Roundtable

Join this online panel discussion for live Q&A with leading industry experts, analysts, and end-users to discuss the latest innovations, best practices, barriers to implementation, and measurable benefits of server virtualization with a particular focus on today's real world solutions.

Webcast: Watch SC09 Birds of a Feather Video: Scalable Fault-Tolerant HPC Supercomputers

Learn about scalable fault-tolerant architectures and examples of energy efficient and scalable supercomputing clusters using dual QDR InfiniBand to combine capacity computing with network failover capabilities with the help of programming languages such as MPI and a robust Linux cluster management package.

Webcast: High Performance Computing for a Smarter Planet

LIVE@SCO9: The IBM team discusses new innovations in hardware, software and services that help clients better understand their workloads and get insight from their R&D efforts. Technology demonstrations include the soon-to-be-released Power7 HPC processor, the DCS990 system with 2.4 petabytes of storage, the xCAT management tool, secure HPC cloud computing and more. Winners of two HPCwire Readers' and Editors’ Choice Awards! Take the IBM virtual tour at SC09 or more information go online to: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/deepcomputing/sc09.html