Dr. Line Pouchard was a Senior Researcher at Brookhaven National Laboratory when she first learned of the Computational Research Leadership Council (CRLC) Seminar Series as part of a U.S. Department Of Energy (DOE) National Laboratories’ effort to broaden connections with universities and rejuvenate the national labs’ workforce. While she worked with many students before, the CRLC seminars helped align research interests between faculty, students, and national lab scientists to create opportunities for collaborations, such as the one Dr. Pouchard has maintained with a student from Tufts University.
“My overall experience was very positive, as I had the opportunity of sharing my research with undergraduate students from various universities,” says Dr. Pouchard, who just retired from a position as High-Performance Computing (HPC) System Software Researcher at Sandia National Laboratories. “The students were very interested but, for the most part, had never heard of the scientific research performed at the DOE National Labs or of the career opportunities available to them there.”
That changed through her seminar, in which Dr. Pouchard examines the methods and benefits of handling provenance of software and data in computer science, in HPC, and recently in artificial intelligence (AI). Provenance is one key component fostering trust in data and models and the reproducibility of results.
By giving her seminar to students at Tufts University, Dr. Pouchard met Professor Lenore Cowen, Professor in the Departments of Computer Science and Mathematics, who introduced Dr. Pouchard to one of her graduate students, Dr. Polina Shpilker. Dr. Shpilker’s own research was directly relevant to Dr. Pouchard’s expertise, and as a result, Dr. Pouchard was able to hire and financially support Dr. Shpilker’s last year of Ph.D. studies through one of Dr. Pouchard’s projects. Dr. Pouchard also joined Dr. Shpilker’s thesis committee as an outside member, and Dr. Shpilker’s project with Dr. Pouchard directly inspired the last chapter in Dr. Shpilker’s Ph.D. thesis.
“Dr. Shpilker did excellent work with me during her summer internships and the last year of her Ph.D.,” says Dr. Pouchard. “She was able to develop advanced skills in the rare combination of provenance for AI, HPC, and computing workflows.”Now Dr. Shpilker has a postdoctoral fellowship at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. “We would not have been able to create these opportunities without CRLC’s early involvement,” says Dr. Pouchard.