Kate Issacs, Assistant Professor, Selected for DOE Early Career Award

May 26, 2021
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Congratulations Dr. Kate Isaacs!

Computer Science Assistant Professor, Kate Isaacs is one of only six academic computer scientists across the nation selected by the Department of Energy (DOE) to receive substantial funding for research as part of the DOE 2021 Early Career Research Program. The program “is designed to bolster the nation’s scientific workforce by providing support to exceptional researchers during the crucial early career years, when many scientists do their most formative work.” The award will provide over $750,000 in research funding that will support graduate students in the CS department.

Dr. Isaacs’s project is entitled, "Node-to-Code Comparison-Centered Interactive Performance Visualization" and will focus on developing new methods for analyzing high-performance applications. Specifically, Dr. Isaacs is developing visual approaches that enable developers to interactively explore application performance and behavior across multiple levels of abstraction, from source code concerns to to events as executed, and do so across multiple executions. By enhancing analysts’ ability to interpret performance-related data, these techniques will facilitate the optimization of simulations and numerical libraries, allowing larger or higher-fidelity computations to occur.

“I am very excited to receive this award and lead this research. Being able to determine how large-scale programs behave in practice will allow our community to further improve them and thus use our most powerful resources for further scientific understanding,” says Dr. Isaacs. “I’m thankful for the support from my colleagues and proud to contribute to UArizona CS’s long-standing history of research and collaboration with DOE laboratories and in visualization and high performance computing.”

Dr. Isaacs joined the University of Arizona Department of Computer Science in January 2016. 
Information about DOE Early Career Research Program: https://science.osti.gov/early-career

View a list of awardee abstracts, including Dr. Isaacs’s, here: FY2021 Award Abstracts and the DOE story here: DOE Awards $100 Million to Early-Career Scientists for Mission-Critical Research.