IEEE Computer Society (IEEE-CS) selects Rabab Alomairy from MIT’s JuliaLab, Tirthak Patel from Rice University, and Yuede (YJ) Ji from University of Texas at Arlington, as 2025 winners of the IEEE-CS Technical Community on High Performance Computing (TCHPC) Early Career Researchers Award for Excellence in High Performance Computing.
Dr. Rabab Alomairy is a Postdoctoral Fellow at MIT’s JuliaLab and a recipient of the prestigious KAUST Ibn Rushd Fellowship. She earned her PhD in Computer Science from King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), where she was part of the Extreme Computing Research Center. Her research spans high-performance computing, task-based numerical libraries, GPU programming, and AI-accelerated scientific applications, with emphasis on performance optimization for multicore and manycore architectures. Rabab has collaborated with leading institutions, including Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the Innovative Computing Laboratory at the University of Tennessee, and MINES ParisTech, contributing to the DOE-funded SLATE project during her internship at UTK. She has also led the first Julia tutorial for productive high-performance computing at the Supercomputing Conference, reflecting her commitment to community building and education. Her work has scaled across the world’s top supercomputers and earned honors including two ACM Gordon Bell Prize Finalist awards, the Gauss Award, and the KAUST Research Excellence Award.
Dr. Tirthak Patel is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Rice University, where he leads the Positive Technology Lab, conducting systems-focused research at the intersection of quantum computing and high-performance computing (HPC). His group develops solutions to advance the practical usability of quantum-classical computing, with a strong emphasis on open-source tools and reproducibility. Before joining Rice, he received his BASc with Honours in Electrical Engineering from the University of Toronto and his PhD in Computer Engineering from Northeastern University. His research has been recognized with the ACM/IEEE-CS George Michael Memorial HPC Fellowship, the NSERC Alexander Graham Bell Canada Graduate Scholarship (CGS D), and Best Paper Finalist honors at the Supercomputing (SC) and ICCAD conferences. His PhD dissertation has received honorable mentions from ACM SIGHPC and IEEE SPEC. At Rice, he has been awarded the Outstanding Undergraduate Research Mentor Award and the Career Champion Award for his dedication to student mentorship.
Dr. Yuede (YJ) Ji is an assistant professor from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Texas at Arlington (UTA). He received his Ph.D. degree from The George Washington University in 2021. Before joining UTA, he worked as an assistant professor at the University of North Texas and a visiting faculty at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He directs the Graph Lab at UTA, where his research spans HPC, graph analytics, and cybersecurity. His work focuses on developing scalable computation techniques for graph analytics, designing novel graph-centric methods for cybersecurity applications, and addressing emerging cybersecurity challenges in HPC systems. His research has been published in leading venues in HPC and cybersecurity, including SC, HPDC, EuroSys, USENIX Security, and ISSTA. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, and Google.