Peter O’Donnell, Jr. Director of the O’Donnell Data Science and Research Computing Institute, SMU
Imam joins SMU on Oct. 9, 2023, from her previous position as director of Strategic Researcher Engagement (North and Latin Americas) at NVIDIA, the accelerated computing leader that invented the GPU.
In her role at NVIDIA, Imam worked with academic researchers to enable the development of GPU-accelerated and AI/ML applications. Before NVIDIA, Imam served as a distinguished scientist and deputy director of research collaboration in the Computing and Computational Sciences Directorate at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where she performed research in high performance computing as well as next-generation microelectronics and Post Moore computing.
Imam has authored and co-authored more than 90 scientific publications in the field of high performance computing including journal articles, book chapters and conference papers, has served as a speaker and panelist in the areas of high-performance and quantum computing at many international and conferences, such as the International Conference on Data Science, International Symposium on Memory Systems, and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Conference on Big Data, and is active in professional organizations to promote research and education in high performance computing and artificial intelligence.
She holds a doctoral degree in electrical engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology, with master's and bachelor's degrees in the same field from Case Western Reserve University and California Institute of Technology, respectively. She served as the Science and Technology Fellow for U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander in Washington D.C. (2010-2012), assisting the senator in the reauthorization of the America COMPETES Act intended to promote U. S. competitiveness in STEM fields. She also assisted in the introduction of the first exascale computing legislation (S. 3459).
Imam is a senior member of IEEE, served as an IEEE officer for multiple years, and is the founding chair of the Accelerated Scalable Computing and Analytics chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery (acm.org).