WiDS Livermore 2024 | Keynote Address

On March 13, 2024, LLNL held a Women in Data Science (WiDS) regional event featuring speakers, panelists, networking and mentoring sessions, and other activities. Learn more about WiDS Livermore at data-science.llnl.gov/wids.
LLNL distinguished member of technical staff Carol Woodward presented "Mathematics Meets Science Meets Computer Science: ​My Career Path to High Performance Computational Science." She outlined her path from almost becoming a microbiologist to working as an applied mathematician at LLNL. She also talked about her work with the SUNDIALS numerical software package, explained how its capabilities are useful for scientific simulations, and gave examples of how the package is applied in scientific simulations on the Lab’s fastest computing systems.
Woodward's research interests include numerical methods for nonlinear partial differential equations, nonlinear and linear solvers, time integration methods, and parallel computing. She leads the development and deployment of the SUNDIALS package of time integrators and nonlinear solvers which garners over 100,000 downloads/clones each year and is used worldwide in an array of scientific simulations. The core SUNDIALS team was honored with the ACM/SIAM Prize in Computational Science and Engineering in 2023. Woodward currently serves as the International Council on Industrial and Applied Mathematics representative and Vice Chair of the Standing Committee for Gender Equality in Science, an international committee of scientific professional unions formed to promote gender equality in sciences worldwide. Woodward is also currently President-Elect of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics.
LLNL-PRES-861639