Dr. İlkay Altıntaş is the Chief Data Science Officer (CDSO) of the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) as well as a Founding Faculty Fellow of the Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute at the University of California, San Diego. She is also the Division Director of Cyberinfrastructure and Convergence Research and Education (CICORE), as a part of the executive team providing strategic and operational leadership to SDSC. As SDSC’s inaugural CDSO, she plans and oversees a broad range of data science research, development and education activities at SDSC and works as a bridge to SDSC’s cross-sector campus, national and global collaborators and partners.
In addition to her administrative duties at SDSC, Dr. Altintas is a tenured Research Scientist and has significant research and education activities in this role. She is the Founding Director of the Workflows for Data Science (WorDS) Center of Excellence and the Founding Director of the WIFIRE Lab. The WoRDS Center specializes in the development of methods, cyberinfrastructure, and workflows for computational data science and its translation to practical applications. The WIFIRE Lab focuses on methods for all-hazards knowledge from data collection to modeling efforts, and has achieved significant success in helping to manage wildfires in California. Altıntaş also holds a joint appointment at Los Alamos National Lab. She served as a Member of the Founding Boards of two community-oriented non-profits — “Data Science Alliance” and “Climate and Wildfire Institute”. Among the awards she has received are the 2015 IEEE TCSC Award for Excellence in Scalable Computing for Early Career Researchers and the 2017 ACM SIGHPC Emerging Woman Leader in Technical Computing Award. Altıntaş holds a Ph.D. degree from the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands.
