Lavanya Ramakrishnan Is Named 2009 Alvarez Fellow

Lavanya Ramakrishnan joins CRD's Advanced Computing for Science department as a Luis W. Alvarez Fellow. She will spend the next few years exploring different techniques and tools for managing science workloads that rely on high performance and distributed systems such as grid and cloud systems.

Originally from India, Ramakrishnan came to the United States nine years ago to pursue a graduate degree at Indiana University, Bloomington. She notes that an interest in grid computing, high performance computing and utility computing, was sparked shortly after taking a class taught by Professor Dennis Gannon, who later served as her research advisor.

“I was inspired by the contributions that high performance computers and other distributed systems could make on scientific research,” says Ramakrishnan.

After finishing her master's degree, Ramakrishnan developed middleware and security architectures for grid-based systems as a research engineer at MCNC, a non-profit organization that employs advanced information technologies solutions for North Carolina's educational community. She later joined the Renaissance Computing Institute as a research staff member and served as the technical lead on several interdisciplinary collaborations, including meteorological modeling, storm surge modeling, as well as bioinformatics and biomedical research.

Ramakrishnan moved to Northern California's Bay Area in 2006 and worked remotely on her Ph.D. at Indiana University. She now lives in Sunnyvale with her husband, and spends much of her free time hiking and reading.