Models and Simulations Run on the Cluster and in the Family - Episode 2

Sarah Wellons

Dr. Sarah Wellons is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics (CIERA) at Northwestern University. She earned her PhD in Astronomy and Astrophysics with a secondary field in Computational Science and Engineering from Harvard University in 2017. Dr. Wellons studies the physics of galaxy formation using massively parallel hydrodynamical cosmological simulations. Her work focuses on the most massive galaxies which formed in the first few billion years after the Big Bang, and on the physics of how star formation is regulated in such galaxies.

Galaxy formation is a highly complex process which links physics on very large scales - like the gravitational collapse of dark matter into the strands, nodes, and voids of the “cosmic web” - and physics on (astrophysically) small scales - like the release of thermal, mechanical, and radiative energy during supernova explosions. Because this process is so multi-scale, numerical simulations of galaxy formation are very computationally expensive and require HPC resources to run. Even the analysis of the simulation data typically occurs on HPC resources, as the memory requirements are too demanding for most non-HPC machines.

Hellen Wellons

Helen Wellons recently retired from her Senior Scientific Advisor role with ExxonMobil Research and Engineering Company after a 30-year career.

Helen, and her spouse Michael, joined Mobil in January, 1990 after receiving Ph.Ds. in Chemical Engineering from Purdue University. She started her career in the Pilot Plant Automation Group, developing supervisory control systems for pilot plants. She then worked in Applied Fluid Mechanics, designing cold flow experiments to develop models for lubes and hydroconversion processes and helped to build the organization’s early Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) capabilities to address refinery challenges.

After the merger with Exxon, she spent a decade deploying ExxonMobil’s Compositional Modeling Platform in Real-Time Optimization (RTO) applications across refining and lubes processes. These compositional RTO applications were broadly deployed across all of our refineries for which Helen was recognized with the EMRE Technology Award.

Leveraging her deep technical expertise and broad organization network, Helen took on a senior technical leadership role in the Compositional Modeling. Integrating across research, engineering, refining, and lubes organizations, she drove improvements in compositional models. When an analytical breakthrough enabled EMRE to be the first organization world-wide to quantify the composition of resid, Helen developed a strategy to extend the Compositional Modeling Platform to the bottom of the barrel. She led a cross-organizational team to provide ExxonMobil with a competitive advantage in making strategic resid disposition decisions across upstream, chemicals, lubes and refining value chains, earning her another EMRE Technology Award. The Heavy Oil Compositional Modeling Platform was a key enabler in accelerated development of recent heavy oil processes.

In addition to her depth and breadth of technical expertise, Helen has spent significant effort in mentoring the next generation of compositional modelers that has provided ExxonMobil Research and Engineering with new capabilities in modeling heavy oil phase behavior, hydroconversion, and thermal conversion. She was a member of the Process Technology Department and ExxonMobil Research and Engineering Senior Technical Councils.

During her 30-year career, Helen and Michael raised four daughters currently 21-31years of age, with careers in astrophysics, data science, mechanical engineering, and sociology.

Nicole Brewer

I am a software engineer in the Scientific Solutions Group within Research Computing at Purdue University. My primary contribution is to the NSF-funded science gateway, GeoEDF, for managing, sharing, analyzing, and visualizing geospacial data. I have also worked in a facilitation roll in a research lab where I implemented and recommended standard practices, training research scientists, wrote workflow-enabling tools, and deployed complex UIs in Jupyter. I’m passionate about improving the state of science through sustainable software practices, the treatment of software as first-class research objects, improved institutional support for research software engineers, and diversity and inclusion. Catch me conversing about these topics on the Long Tales of Science Podcast - a podcast about women in HPC!