Suzanne Parete-Koon is a High Performance Computing Engineer for OLCF at ORNL and leads the Computing and Computational Sciences Directorate Workforce Initiative. She works to support scientific applications running on Frontier and other HPC resources at ORNL.
After completing her PhD in astrophysics at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, in 2008, Parete-Koon spent a year working as a foreign affairs officer for the US Department of State through an American Institute of Physics diplomacy fellowship. During that time, she served as a representative to the ITER Council and as the United States’ primary point of contact for Space Weather. She helped foster international relations by facilitating global scientific collaboration through workshops and meetings, including the United States–Egyptian remote sensing satellite data workshop. In 2009, she accepted a postdoctoral position with the Scientific Computing Group at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF), a DOE Office of Science User Facility located at ORNL. At that time, she was working on developing computational simulations of the web of nuclear reactions that power stars and stellar explosions.
Her passion for people eventually directed her interests toward the support angle of computational science. Between 2011 and 2017, she worked as an OLCF User Support Specialist, collaborating with OLCF staff on innovations to improve user experiences and working directly with users to help them get the most out of their time on Titan. Starting in 2018, she worked for approximately two years as the User Support Group Leader for the Neuton Sciences User Program implemented at SNS and HFIR. Where she managed an excellent team that led the proposal calls for SNS and HFIR experiments and on-boarded facility users. In 2019, she returned to OLCF and the Computing and Computational Sciences Directorate, where she now leads the Workforce Initiative.