Oak Ridge Appoints Gina Tourassi to Associate Laboratory Director Post

The Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory has announced the assignment of Gina Tourassi as associate laboratory director of the Computing and Computational Sciences Directorate.

More than 500 researchers work at CCSD, which is in charge of the Frontier exascale supercomputer, ORNL said Monday.

The directorate also handles most of the lab’s artificial intelligence, quantum computing and networking efforts. Tourassi said such subjects will remain priorities in the coming years.

According to a press release, Tourassi will focus on strengthening ORNL’s AI technology leadership, overseeing continued breakthroughs by the Quantum Science Center and contributing to the development of OLCF-6, the lab’s latest supercomputer.

She is also expected to grow and retain a workforce with personnel ranging from the early to the senior levels.

Tourassi has served as director of ORNL’s National Center for Computational Sciences since 2019. She previously led the lab’s biomedical sciences, engineering and computing group and founded its Health Data Sciences Institute.