Thought Leader Profile
Ilkay Altintas
Chief Data Science Officer, San Diego Supercomputer Center
Ilkay Altıntas, PhD, is the chief data science officer (CDSO) of the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), as well as a founding faculty fellow of the Halicioglu Data Science Institute. She is also the director of the Cyberinfrastructure and Convergence Research Division (CICORE) as part of the executive team providing strategic and operational leadership to SDSC.
As its inaugural CDSO, Ilkay 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, she is a tenured research scientist and has significant research and education activities in this role.
Ilkay is the founding director of the Workflows for Data Science (WorDS) Center of Excellence and 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.
Ilkay holds a joint appointment at Los Alamos National Lab. She served as a member of the founding boards of two community-oriented nonprofits, the Data Science Alliance and the 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. Ilkay serves on the elected Board of Governors for the IEEE Computer Society and was appointed by California Governor Newsom to the Wildfire Technology Research and Development Review advisory board. She holds a PhD from the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands.
Ilkay is a co-initiator of and an active contributor to the popular open-source Kepler Scientific Workflow System and the co-author of publications related to computational data science and e-Sciences at the intersection of scientific workflows, provenance, distributed computing, bioinformatics, observatory systems, conceptual data querying, and software modeling.
Ilkay is the inaugural recipient of the SDSC Pi Person of the Year (2014) and the IEEE TCSC Award for Excellence in Scalable Computing for Early Career Researchers (2015).
Speaker at FiRe 2018
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News for Ilkay Altintas
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Posted on Sun Apr 6, 2025, 7:00 am
UC San Diego’s WIFIRE Program Provides Real-Time Information to Wildfire Resp... -
Posted on Tue Oct 15, 2024, 7:00 am
UC San Diego Launches the Wildfire Science & Technology Commons - UC San Dieg... -
Posted on Thu Mar 14, 2024, 7:00 am
Broadening Access to Bridge the Gap between Data Innovation and Computing Inf... -
Posted on Tue Aug 29, 2023, 7:00 am
WIFIRE Lab Forms New Partnership with U.S. Department of Homeland Security - ... -
Posted on Thu Aug 24, 2023, 7:00 am
UC San Diego Researchers Receive $5.7M for Climate Action Projects - UC San D... -
Posted on Fri Aug 20, 2021, 7:00 am
From Supercomputers to Fire-Starting Drones, These Tools Help Fight Wildfires... -
Posted on Mon Nov 19, 2018, 8:00 am
California Firefighters Use Supercomputers to Forecast Wildfires - KQED -
Posted on Wed Nov 15, 2017, 8:00 am
Dr. Ilkay Altintas, Chief Data Scientist Speaks at Event - nu.edu -
Posted on Thu Aug 13, 2015, 7:00 am
SDSC Names Ilkay Altintas Chief Data Science Officer - UC San Diego Today