One could argue Suzan Anwar, Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Philander Smith College, is addicted to expanding her students’ research and career options. This past summer was the fifth time she participated in the SHI’s Sustainable Research Pathways (SRP) workshop, and the positive impacts ripple into her research, her classroom, and her college.
“SRP has opened doors for me. After working in a national lab and seeing how they do research with super computers, the facilities, and that software, I shifted my track from teaching to teaching and research,” says Anwar. “SRP also had a big impact on me getting tenure because I had done so many visiting research programs that influenced my research, grants, and papers.”
For 12 years, SRP has designed programs to connect U.S. researchers and project leaders with students and faculty to encourage lasting collaborations, jump start careers, and build innovative workplace environments. Last year, High Performance Software Foundation (HPSF) supported SRP projects that advanced portable software across a wide range of hardware platforms by improving adoption and supporting development efforts.
This summer Anwar was connected with Dr. Kenneth Moreland, Distinguished R&D Staff Member at Oak Ridge National Laboratory for the Visualization group in the Computer Science and Mathematics Division. Moreland and his team developed Viskores, a toolkit of scientific visualization algorithms for emerging processor architectures. With Anwar and her student, Morleland and his team wanted to see if Viskores toolkit could be used to improve MRI images to identify brain tumors. In addition to Viskores, they used Frontier and Python packages, and in the end, they saw a great improvement in classification accuracy. They will be presenting a poster about their findings at the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis (SC26).
Following a highly successful summer 2026 research cycle, Anwar and Moreland plan to work together through another SRP next summer—with a different student cohort from Philander Smith College. “Every time I participate in SRP, I bring new students, and I select projects that might cover gaps in the curriculum here,” says Anwar. “I want my students to explore and learn.”
Anwar’s five-year participation in the SRP program has taken her to Argonne, Lawrence Berkeley, and now Oak Ridge National Laboratories and also raised the profile of Philander Smith University. By collaborating with national laboratories, she integrates advanced research into the classroom and creates life-changing career and networking pipelines for her computer science students.
“Now when my students ask me something, I can connect them with people at several national labs,” she says. “For students at a smaller Historically Black College or University (HBCU), it is incredible.”