Valerie Taylor has received a 2018 Outstanding Electrical and Computer Engineer (ECE) Award from Purdue University. The award is given to alumni of Purdue ECE who have made a difference in the world through their innovation and leadership. 

“I am highly honored to be recognized as a distinguished alumna of Purdue University, and I hope to continue to serve as a leader in promoting high-performance computing and its benefits to our society,” said Taylor.

Taylor was appointed director of the Mathematics and Computer Science (MCS) Division at Argonne in 2017. Her research has focused on performance analysis and modeling of parallel scientific applications, and she has won numerous awards for her leadership in the high-performance computing community.  She is a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and the Association for Computing Machinery. 

Taylor received her B.S. and M.S. degrees from Purdue University and her Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science from the University of California at Berkeley. In 2002, she joined Texas A&M University, where she served as department head of CSE and subsequently was the senior associate dean of academic affairs in the College of Engineering and a Regents Professor and the Royce E. Wisenbaker Professor. She also received the Computing Research Association’s A. Nico Habermann Award for outstanding contributions aimed at increasing the numbers and successes of underrepresented groups in the computing research community. Prior to joining Texas A&M, she was a professor at Northwestern University for 11 years, during which time she also held a guest appointment with the MCS Division at Argonne. 

“This is an exciting time for the high-performance computing community and for Argonne in particular as the Laboratory continues to make advances in applied mathematics and computing sciences,” said Taylor. ​“My goal is to expand our research to meet the challenges of emerging exascale supercomputers and to collaborate with scientists and engineers in tackling some of the nation’s most pressing problems that can be solved by exploiting such resources.”

The award was presented to Taylor during the ECE Awards event at Purdue on November 2, 2018.