Team

Dr. İlkay Altıntaş is the Chief Data Science Officer at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at UC San Diego. In this role, she oversees a broad range of data science research, development, and education activities and provides strategic and operational leadership as a member of the executive team. At SDSC, she is also a Research Scientist and the Division Director of Cyberinfrastructure and Convergence Research and Education (CICORE).

Altıntaş is the Founding Director of both the WIFIRE Lab and the Workflows for Data Science (WorDS) Center of Excellence. The WIFIRE Lab focuses on methods for all-hazards knowledge from data collection to modeling efforts and has achieved significant success in helping to manage wildfires in California through the Integrated Real-time Intelligence System (FIRIS) statewide public-private partnership. The WoRDS Center specializes in the development of methods, cyberinfrastructure, and workflows for computational data science and its translation to practical applications. In her efforts related to wildland fire response and mitigation, Altıntaş works to expand the understanding of data as infrastructure, focusing on the generation of data standards and collaborations between operational and research communities around data.

Altıntaş holds a joint appointment at Los Alamos National Lab, sits on the IEEE Computer Science Board of Governors, is a Fellow of the Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute, and is a Board Member of the Data Science Alliance and the Climate and Wildfire Institute. Among the awards she has received are the 2015 IEEE TCSC Award for Excellence in Scalable Computing for Early Career Researchers and the 2017 ACM SIGHPC Emerging Woman Leader in Technical Computing Award. Altıntaş holds a Ph.D. from the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands.

Dr. Rodman Linn is a senior scientist in the Earth and Environmental Sciences Division at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). For the last two decades at LANL, Linn has led efforts to develop and use next-generation process-based wildfire models for the study of fundamental wildfire behavior, prescribed fire phenomenology, and influences of complex environmental conditions on fire behavior. Dr. Linn serves a PoC for a variety of collaborations with academic, government, and international partners and  has provided technical supervision for 15 PhD students at 11 different universities in the US and abroad.

Linn has been the principal investigator for two R&D100 winning numerical models. These models include the process-based coupled fire/atmosphere model, FIRETEC, which runs on massively-parallel high performance computing platforms, and the fast-running coupled fire-atmosphere model QUIC-Fire, which is designed to enable large ensembles of simulations and to provide prescribed fire decision support.

Linn holds a joint appointment at UC San Diego, where he is an adjunct Professor in the Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute and serves as the Associate Director for Fire Science at the WIFIRE Lab at the San Diego Supercomputer Center. He has been an associate editor for the International Journal of Wildland Fire and guest/section Editor for Fire Journal. Dr. Linn was a founding member of the Prescribed Fire Science Consortium, and Associate Director of the California Institute of Hazards Research, and a member of the New Mexico State University Mechanical Engineering Academy.

Melissa Floca is the Director of Strategic Partnerships at the CICORE Division of the San Diego Supercomputer at UC San Diego. In her role, she brings together policymakers, practitioners, and researchers around complex challenges that require cyberinfrastructure and digital technologies for solutions at scale. She works on a range of research projects and experiential education efforts related to wildfire response and mitigation.

Prior to joining the San Diego Supercomputer Center, Melissa served as the Associate Director of UC San Diego’s Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies, where she led the development and implementation of the Center’s academic programming and research agenda. During her time there, she focused on issues of education, workforce development, and economic competitiveness and directed the Mexican Migration Field Research Program. Before joining UC San Diego in 2013, Melissa worked at the Mexico City-based office of McKinsey & Company, serving clients on projects related to financial inclusion, public health, and low-income housing.

Melissa sits on the International Affairs Board of the City of San Diego and the Board of Directors of Create Purpose and is a Senior Advisor to the Kroc Institute for Peace and Justice. She is a graduate of Johns Hopkins University and Columbia Business School.

Julia Oliveto is a member of  the Earth and Environmental Science Division at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). In her role at LANL, she works closely with staff scientists and collaborators providing technical and logistical support on fire and climate research topics. She also helps develop, maintain, and operate existing computational models created at LANL. Julia is a graduate of Florida State University with studies in Scientific Computing and Mathematics.