Lavanya Ramakrishnan is Division Deputy in the Scientific Data Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab.  Her research focuses on developing generalized methods and tools to manage workflows and data while working closely with scientific groups and influencing the design of next-generation high performance computing systems.  Her current research explores the methods and infrastructure needed to support automation and self-driving for various scientific applications including earth sciences and microelectronics.  Ramakrishnan established and leads a scientific user research program focusing on studying and enumerating the way that scientists and communities use data and workflows to build usable tools for science. Ramakrishnan serves on the High Performance Distributed Computing Steering Committee, iHARP NSF HDR Institute’s Advisory board and has previously served as the Associate Editor for Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing and as program committee chair for various conferences.

She has masters and doctoral degrees in computer science from Indiana University and a bachelor degree in computer engineering from VJTI, University of Mumbai and joined Berkeley Lab as an Alvarez Fellow.  Previously she has worked as a research staff member at Renaissance Computing Institute and MCNC in North Carolina.