Presenter

Ayesha Afzal is a researcher at the Erlangen National High Performance Computing Center (NHR@FAU) in Germany. She holds a PhD in Computer Science, an MSc in Computational Engineering, and a BSc in Electrical Engineering. Her PhD research, titled “A Holistic White-Box Approach to Performance Modeling for Supercomputing,” focused on analytical performance models, performance tools, and parallel simulation frameworks in HPC. She also explores multi-core architectures, parallel algorithms and programming models, domain-specific languages, energy efficiency, operational cost management, and sustainable computing, while teaching tutorials and supervising undergraduate and master’s students. She is actively involved in HPC initiatives such as KONWHIR with the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ), the DFG-funded MOD4COMP project with TU Dresden and Jülich, and the NHR EEC project across German NHR centers.

Ayesha contributes to the HPC community through various leadership roles. Within the IEEE Computer Society, she serves as Vice Chair of both the Germany Section Chapter and Region 8 Area 2, and as Secretary of IEEE TCHPC. She founded the NHR Women in HPC chapter, is elected women’s representative at FAU, and organizes recurring workshops at major international conferences (SC, ISC, ACM HPDC, and SCA/HPCAsia). She is a member of several professional societies (IEEE, ACM, SIAM, and PRACE) and actively contributes to the scientific community as a chair, vice chair, committee member, journal reviewer, panelist, and speaker. She was featured in the Top 100 Future Leaders Role Model List (2022–2025), supported by Yahoo Finance and YouTube, won WeAreTheCity’s Global Award for Achievement (2023) and was listed in the SCW75 HPC list (2026). She has authored numerous peer-reviewed publications, and her work has received several distinctions, including the ISC PhD Forum Award (1st place, 2021), IEEE TPDS Best Paper Runner-up Award (2023), SC PMBS Best Short Paper Award (2023), SC Best Research Poster Finalist (2024), ISC Best Research Poster Award (1st place, 2025) and PhD with highest distinction (summa cum laude, 2026).