Valerie Elaine Taylor (born May 24, 1963) is an American computer scientist who is the director of the Mathematics and Computer Science Division of

Argonne National Laboratory Argonne National Laboratory is a science and engineering research United States Department of Energy National Labs, national laboratory operated by University of Chicago, UChicago Argonne LLC for the United States Department of Energy. The facil ...

in Illinois. Her research includes topics such as performance analysis, power analysis, and resiliency. She is known for her work on "Prophesy," described as "a database used to collect and analyze data to predict the performance on different applications on parallel systems."

Early life and education

Valerie Elaine Taylor was born May 24, 1963, in Chicago, Illinois. Taylor received her bachelor's and master's degrees in

electrical engineering Electrical engineering is an engineering discipline concerned with the study, design, and application of equipment, devices, and systems which use electricity, electronics, and electromagnetism. It emerged as an identifiable occupation in the l ...

from Purdue University in 1985 and 1986, respectively. In 1991, Taylor received her

PhD PHD or PhD may refer to: * Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), an academic qualification Entertainment * '' PhD: Phantasy Degree'', a Korean comic series * ''Piled Higher and Deeper'', a web comic * Ph.D. (band), a 1980s British group ** Ph.D. (Ph.D. albu ...

at the University of California, Berkeley in electrical engineering and computer science, under advisor

David Messerschmitt David G. Messerschmitt (born May 21, 1945) is an engineer and professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences in the UC Berkeley College of Engineering. He retired from ...

. She holds a patent for her dissertation work on sparse matrices.

Work

Shortly after her PhD in 1993, Taylor earned an NSF National Young Investigator Award. She was a faculty member of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at Northwestern University for 11 years. From 2003 until 2011, she joined the Texas A&M University faculty as the Head of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, working on high performance computing. There, she served as the senior associate dean of academic affairs in the College of Engineering and a Regents Professor and the Royce E. Wisenbaker Professor in the Department of Computer Science. She also began the Industries Affiliates Program which allows academics to engage industry partners. While on the faculty of both Northwestern and Texas A&M, Taylor collaborated with research with

, including a summer sabbatical in 2011. As of July 3, 2017, she is the director of the Mathematics and Computer Science Division of Argonne in Illinois. At Argonne, she cowrote the Department of Energy's comprehensive AI for Science report based on a series of Town Hall meetings. Taylor is the CEO & President of the Center for Minorities and People with Disabilities in IT (CMD-IT). The organization seeks to develop the participation of minorities and people with disabilities in the IT workforce in the United States. Recently, the U.S. Department of Energy awarded almost $54 million to fund ten new projects related to microelectronics design and production, of which Taylor will lead one project at the

Awards and honors

Taylor has received numerous awards for distinguished research, leadership, and efforts to increase diversity in computing. She has authored or co-authored more than 100 papers in the area of high performance computing, with a focus on performance analysis and modeling of parallel scientific applications. Taylor is a member of IEEE. In 2013 she was elected a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers "for contributions to performance enhancement of parallel computing applications", and in 2016 as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery for her "leadership in broadening participation in computing." In 2019, she was named an Argonne Distinguished Fellow, an award which represents only three percent of research staff at the facility. Her awards include: * Richard A. Tapia Achievement Award for Scientific Scholarship, Civic Science, and Diversifying Computing *Outstanding Young Engineering Alumni Award from the University of California, Berkeley * MOBE Influencers and Innovators of the Internet and Technology *

Hewlett-Packard The Hewlett-Packard Company, commonly shortened to Hewlett-Packard ( ) or HP, was an American multinational information technology company headquartered in Palo Alto, California. HP developed and provided a wide variety of hardware components ...

Harriet B. Rigas Education Award * Sigma Xi Distinguished Lecturer *

A. Nico Habermann Award The Computing Research Association (CRA) is a 501(c)3 non-profit association of North American academic departments of computer science, computer engineering, and related fields; laboratories and centers in industry, government, and academia enga ...

*AccessComputing Capacity Building Award

References

External links

Valerie Taylor's Biography and Oral Histories
from The HistoryMakers.
Valerie E. Taylor
on Microsoft Academic Search
Valerie E. Taylor
on

ResearchGate ResearchGate is a European commercial social networking site for scientists and researchers to share papers, ask and answer questions, and find collaborators. According to a 2014 study by ''Nature'' and a 2016 article in ''Times Higher Education'' ...

Valerie E. Taylor biography
from

{{DEFAULTSORT:Taylor, Valerie Living people 1963 births People from Chicago Texas A&M University faculty Northwestern University faculty Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery Fellow Members of the IEEE Women computer scientists African-American computer scientists American women computer scientists American computer scientists 21st-century African-American people 20th-century African-American people