WiDS Livermore

Coinciding with International Women’s Day on March 8, LLNL's fourth WiDS regional event brought women together to discuss successes, opportunities and challenges of being female in a mostly male field. The Lab’s first-ever virtual WiDS gathering attracted dozens of LLNL data scientists as well as some from outside the Lab, and featured speakers, a career panel and breakout sessions where women could network and discuss mentoring and career advancement. WiDS Ambassador Marisa Torres told attendees, “We’re here to celebrate a lot of accomplishments.”

Read more about the 2021 virtual event via LLNL News. A WebEx recording of the career panel session will be available soon. Speakers' slides are downloadable as PDFs:

• Ana Kupresanin, deputy director of the Center for Applied Scientific Computing: A Statistician’s Journey to LLNL
• Nisha Mulakken, co-director of the Data Science Summer Institute: Data Science in Action: Research, Internships, and Mentoring

LLNL hosted its third regional event on March 2. The day’s agenda featured local speakers, a career panel, mentoring sessions, and a networking reception interspersed with highlights from the Stanford livestream. Co-organizer Masha Aseeva stated, “Often, a woman with a technology career is the only woman in a room full of men, which can feel isolating. This event opens up the LLNL community to a broad network of women in data science so that we can support each other.”

Recaps of the whole day and the technical talks are available on this website. Speakers' slides are downloadable as PDFs:

• Welcome & agenda
• Marisol Gamboa: Data Science on a Mission
• Alyson Fox: Collaborative Autonomy Work in Unreliable Computing Environments
• Kathleen Schmidt: Sensitivity Analysis: Quantifying What Matters
• Kelli Humbird: Machine Learning-Guided Discovery and Design for Inertial Confinement Fusion
• Giuliana Pallotta: Multi-Frequency Analysis of Modeled-Versus-Observed Variability in Tropospheric Temperature

2019 marked the second consecutive WiDS Livermore event. "The goal is to increase interactions and make connections," said WiDS Livermore Ambassador Marisa Torres. "We want to get ideas of how we can foster this kind of community building throughout the year beyond this one event…I really want people to be able to talk about each other’s research and get ideas on how to collaborate and expand their network of who’s doing data science." Read more about the 2019 conference via LLNL News.

At the 2018 WiDS Livermore event, nearly 70 attendees, mostly women Livermore and Sandia national laboratory employees, heard featured talks by female LLNL scientists on machine learning and data analytics, and viewed a live broadcast of the daylong world conference from Stanford. Data scientist Ana Paula Sales began the day by presenting a talk on applying machine learning to the Cancer Moonshot and& Cancer Registry of Norway patient medical records, followed by machine learning group leader Brenda Ng, who discussed applying deep feature learning techniques in video analytics. Read more about the 2018 event via LLNL News.