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NERSC’s Debbie Bard Appointed Group Lead for Data Science Engagement

January 10, 2019

Debbie Bard has been named group lead for the Data Science Engagement Group (DSEG) at Berkeley Lab’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC). She had been acting group lead since March 2018, overseeing DSEG’s support of supercomputing for experimental science at NERSC.

Bard, who earned her Ph.D. in particle physics from the University of Edinburgh and is a native of the United Kingdom, started at NERSC as a Big Data Architect, where she focused on data-intensive computing and research. Before joining NERSC in 2015, she worked as a project scientist on the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope at the SLAC National Accelerator Center and developed and taught a course at Stanford University on "Discovering the Cosmos."

In 2018 Bard was invited to give a presentation during Google I/O, Google’s annual developer’s conference, where she talked about how machine learning and deep learning are being used in cosmology to explore the large-scale structure of the universe. She has also been instrumental in the development of CosmoFlow, the first large-scale science application to use the TensorFlow framework on a CPU-based high performance computing platform with synchronous training.

Bard is also leading the Computing Sciences Area Superfacility initiative, which is bringing together experts from NERSC, ESnet and CRD to support experimental science pipelines. 


About NERSC and Berkeley Lab
The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) is a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science User Facility that serves as the primary high performance computing center for scientific research sponsored by the Office of Science. Located at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, NERSC serves almost 10,000 scientists at national laboratories and universities researching a wide range of problems in climate, fusion energy, materials science, physics, chemistry, computational biology, and other disciplines. Berkeley Lab is a DOE national laboratory located in Berkeley, California. It conducts unclassified scientific research and is managed by the University of California for the U.S. Department of Energy. »Learn more about computing sciences at Berkeley Lab.