Lisa Childers, Principal Software Engineer
Lisa Childers is a principal software engineer in the Advanced Integration Group, having joined the ALCF in 2013. Her career at Argonne began in 1997 in the Mathematics and Computer Science Division, where she was a key contributor to the Access Grid and Globus projects. With expertise in coding, design, testing, technical writing, and project management, her interests include collaboratively developing technologies that empower others.
In 2025, Lisa’s work centered on Aurora acceptance testing, AI technology exploration, and maintaining the Polaris XALT deployment. She participated in the Aurora failure analysis, where her characterization of hundreds of failures helped experts from HPE, Intel, and ALCF successfully complete the acceptance testing process. Lisa also explored the limitations and opportunities of large language models (LLMs), creating a proof-of-concept ALCF chatbot and providing input to the developers of the official AskALCF chatbot. For the XALT framework, she focused on leveraging its data on Polaris, creating reports and tests to identify issues and uncover insights in the production data.
Sam Foreman, Assistant Computational Scientist
Sam Foreman is a computational scientist in ALCF’s AI/ML group and co-lead of the Models and Pre-Training team for AuroraGPT. His work centers on training large-scale foundation models on supercomputers
He contributed to two consecutive ACM Gordon Bell Prize finalist projects: AERIS, a climate foundation model recognized in 2025, and MProt-DPO, a protein design workflow that cleared the exaFLOP barrier at SC24. Both earned Impact Argonne Awards. His earlier work on GenSLMs received the 2022 ACM Gordon Bell Special Prize for HPC-Based COVID-19 Research.
Beyond research, Foreman helps shape the broader HPC ecosystem as Chair of the APEX Technical Steering Committee, a contributor to the DeepSpeed Technical Steering Committee, and a member of the Coordinating Panel for Software and Computing (CPSC), which guides software and computing strategy for the U.S. High Energy Physics program. He also leads AI/HPC curriculum at the annual ALCF Undergraduate HPC Bootcamp, mentors early-career researchers, and co-organizes the High Performance Python for Science at Scale (HPPSS) workshop at SC.
Longfei Gao, Performance Engineer
Longfei has been a staff member at ALCF with the Performance Engineering team since 2023. His work has been focusing on system validation testing and mixed/reduced precision computing, motivated by the trend of large-scale and low-precision computing. He is part of the Aurora Acceptance team that facilitated Aurora’s successful delivery in early 2025 and received an Impact Argonne award for this activity. Since 2025, Longfei has been working on applying the knowledge of mathematics and numerics to system validation test design, preparing for future large-scale systems to be deployed at ALCF and possibly elsewhere. A specific emphasis of Longfei’s recent work is on leveraging the properties of floating point arithmetic in detecting inadvertent errors such as hardware defects and software bugs.
In a related activity, Longfei aims to bridge the gap between modern hardware characteristics and user preferences for scientific projects supported at ALCF. His work in this area focuses on the abundance of low-precision computing capability, such as FP16/BF16, that scientific users at ALCF, who generally prefer computing at high precision such as FP32/FP64, have yet to fully tap into. Through organizing workshop, inviting seminar speakers, supervising students, scholarly writing and presenting, and individual discussions, Longfei is enthusiastic about assisting scientific users in exploiting the low-precision capabilities on modern hardware and optimistic about seeing such efforts yield strong returns in scientific outputs.
Kristy Henmueller, HPC Partnerships and Outreach Specialist
Kristy Henmueller is a member of the User Experience and Outreach team at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility. She contributes to the Lighthouse initiative, a program that partners with university research computing centers to expand access to ALCF’s world-class computing resources. In this role, she manages and grows institutional partnerships by coordinating onboarding workshops, developing tailored training materials, and representing ALCF at university computing events. She also helped establish and launch the Intro to HPC Bootcamp, an education initiative designed to reach students across a wide range of STEM backgrounds, where she designed and presented an interactive visualization tutorial
In addition to developing institution-specific engagement strategies for Lighthouse partners, Kristy has helped expand the program’s reach by supporting new and existing collaborations with universities and research computing centers. She also contributes to a cross-institutional HPC education working group, through which collaboration she co-authored a peer-reviewed paper presented at the SC25 workshop on Best Practices for HPC Training and Education.
Beyond her primary responsibilities, Kristy is actively involved in mentoring and outreach efforts. She participates in the Women in HPC Chicago Chapter, leads ALCF facility tours for visiting academic groups, and provides Python training for summer interns. She also supports student-focused computing initiatives across Chicago, including volunteering at SparkHacks and participating in local Women in STEM programming.
Joseph Insley, Assistant Computer Scientist
Joe Insley has researched scientific data visualization at Argonne National Laboratory for more than 25 years. He has been a primary member of the ALCF’s Visualization and Data Analytics Team since the facility’s inception, and the Team Lead since 2016. With graduate degrees in computer science and fine arts he draws on his diverse background to help science teams investigate their large-scale data and communicate their findings to a broad audience.
He and his team work closely with facility users from a wide range of scientific domains, developing cutting edge visualizations that provide insight into their large-scale simulation data. His visualizations have been used by his collaborators to disseminate their findings to both technical audiences and the public, as well as for outreach activities by the ALCF, Argonne, and the Department of Energy, including adorning the doors of ALCF’s supercomputers. They have been used in support of Gordon Bell Finalists, and appeared in art exhibits and on the covers of many scientific publications, including the international science journal Nature.
In 2025, Insley served as the chair of Supercomputing 25’s (SC25’s) Art of HPC program, a showcase of the intersection between artistic creativity and high-performance computing, which included an array of exhibits, presentations, and activities throughout the conference. In addition to leading the visualization session for the intensive ATPESC workshop, he aims to inspire the next-generation workforce by mentoring student interns, developing and teaching coding camps for high school students, and providing tours of the ALCF Visualization Lab—including its 28-by-8-foot tiled display wall and other display technologies—for students at all levels from middle school to graduate school.
Laura Schulz, Project Lead for Innovation
Laura Schulz joined the Argonne team in spring 2025, and now leads efforts to integrate quantum computing into the advanced computing ecosystem alongside HPC and AI. Prioritizing users, she works to enable domain scientists to focus on new discovery and results through the use of quantum, supported by optimized workflow orchestration, scheduling, and observability across these resources. She emphasizes that progress through quantum-inclusive supercomputing hinges not only on hardware, but on robust system and service design, software, connectivity, and policies that make hybrid systems usable and useful for the user.
Looking ahead, Laura is focused on stabilizing quantum computing into HPC user centers and implementing system-level capabilities, such as AI-driven orchestration and adaptive execution, to move hybrid computing from experimental platforms into dependable tools for scientific research.
P.C. Shyamshankar, Containerization and Confidential Computing Architect
Shyam joined ALCF in 2024; he currently serves as the team lead and system architect for the containerization, cloud, and confidential computing team in the ALCF’s operations group.
In 2025, Shyam’s primary focus was the design, architecture, and procurement of the Artemis compute cluster, an upcoming resource at ALCF aimed at running persistent services and containerized workloads and interoperating with the facility’s existing HPC resources. As part of this work, he did extensive information gathering across a variety of audiences, including the ALCF’s user base, staff, and other stakeholders across the scientific computing community. He represented the ALCF at the ASCR cloud roundtable, and co-founded a DOE-wide Kubernetes working group, bringing together practitioners across the national lab complex to have biweekly discussions on the use of cloud-native technologies at their respective sites.
As part of DOE’s Genesis Mission, Shyam currently serves as co-lead of infrastructure services for the American Science Cloud (AmSC), where he coordinates infrastructure providers to drive the vision of integrating resources across the DOE facility ecosystem. As part of this effort, he also led the design phase of Kubernetes integration across compute facilities, and the deployment of services to the AmSC cloud environment.
Shyam’s research interests revolve around making research computing more compositional, leveraging well-defined schemas and interfaces to allow interoperation between heterogeneous groups of capabilities across the scientific research community. Shyam is a computer scientist and researcher by training, having received his PhD from the Johns Hopkins University in 2018, where his work involved the use of formal methods to improve memory management for large-scale data processing.