Meet the recipients of the 2023 Mark O. Robbins PrizE

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Advanced Research Computing at Hopkins (ARCH) is delighted to announce the recipients of the 2023 Mark O. Robbins Prize in high performance computing.

We congratulate Katharine Jenike, Dr. Katiana Kontolati and Dr. Thomas Edwards for being this year’s PhD and Future Faculty award recipients.

PhD Award recipients

Katharine Jenike

Jenike is pursuing a PhD in Human Genetics and is advised by Dr. Michael C. Shatz.

“My work focuses on developing computational methods in the emerging field of pan-genomics, a branch of genomics which aims to comprehensively characterize genetic variation among large groups, both within and between species. Currently I am building workflows to construct chromosome-scale pan-genomes, and an analysis toolkit to efficiently encode, visualize, and compare these pan-genomes.”

– Katherine Jenike

Dr. Katiana Kontolati

Kontolati recently obtained her PhD in Civil and Systems Engineering in April 2023 and was advised by Dr. Michael D. Shields.

“My research broadly revolves around scientific machine learning and high-dimensional uncertainty quantification (UQ) with a focus on surrogate modeling for partial differential equations (PDE) under uncertainty. It spans a broad spectrum of problems in physics and engineering covering a wide range of spatiotemporal scales from modeling the evolution of material fracture at the molecular level to studying large-scale atmospheric fluid flows. “

– Dr. Katiana Kontolati

Future faculty award recipient

Dr. Thomas Edwards

Edwards holds a PhD in Astroparticle Physics and is advised by Dr. Marc Kamionkowski.

“Gravitational wave data analysis is an expensive multi-stage process involving model building, noise characterization, signal detection, and parameter estimation. My work focuses on building new analysis tools that utilize modern statistical methods and high-performance computing (in particular GPUs) to improve both the performance and computational efficiency of these various analysis steps.”

– Dr. Thomas Edwards

As we celebrate the accomplishments of the Robbins Prize recipients, we want to thank all the talented research nominees as well as their advisors. We also want to show our appreciation towards the faculty judges for their hard work in the award selection process. 

Finally, please join us in extending a congratulations to this year’s recipients for their past contributions to the High Performance Computing community. We wish Jenike, Kontolati, and Edwards great success in all their research and professional endeavors.

About the Robbins prize:  Mark O. Robbins received BA and MA degrees from Harvard University. He was a Churchill Fellow at Cambridge University, U.K., and received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Robbins was a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Johns Hopkins from 1986 until his untimely death in 2020. He was a renowned condensed matter and statistical physicist who played a key role in supporting the development of computational facilities at Johns Hopkins, through his leadership for the Maryland Advanced Research Computing Center in the Institute for Data-Intensive Engineering and Science.