About Me

Chief Data Science Officer San Diego Supercomputer Center | Founding Faculty Fellow, Halicioglu Data Science Institute, UCSD

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.