A true balancing act

Helping other researchers be more productive is the driving goal of computer scientist Boyana Norris.

Making life easier for other researchers is Boyana Norris' driving goal as a computer scientist. "I want scientists and engineers to be able to spend as little time as possible on computational technology so they can focus on what they're really interested in," she said.

To achieve that goal, Norris works on enabling technologies for high-performance simulations in computational science and engineering, with emphasis on automating the development, deployment and performance tuning of parallel applications. Such technologies can be used in a variety of scientific studies. For example, automatic differentiation has successfully been employed in atmospheric chemistry, breast cancer modeling, storm modeling and power system analysis. The challenge of working with researchers from such diverse fields is what Norris finds appealing about working at a multidisciplinary lab like Argonne.

Norris first came to Argonne as a student in 1998 and returned in 1999 as a postdoctoral researcher. In 2001 she was appointed as assistant computer scientist in the lab's Mathematics and Computer Science (MCS) Division and received a promotion to computer scientist earlier this year." Boyana has become an indispensable member of the MCS Division and a significant contributor to the international reputation of Argonne as a leader in the development of automatic differentiation technology," said Rusty Lusk, acting MCS Division director.

Norris came to her career naturally. Her father is a computer science professor. "He would take me to work when I was 6 or 7 and show me the mainframes and the punch cards. I always found it fascinating," she said.

Her route to Argonne, however, was a little more circuitous. Born and raised in Bulgaria, she immigrated to the United States in 1990 with her parents and siblings. "We left when the Iron Curtain was raised. If we could have, we would have left sooner." Leaving was still a challenge, though, because the Bulgarian government allowed noone to leave with more than $30 in cash. Norris said she'd probably think twice about such an undertaking now, but at the time it didn't seem like such a big deal.

Her family first went to Massachusetts, where her father had a one-year appointment as a professor and where Norris finished high school. From there they went to Minnesota, and after that to North Carolina. Norris received a bachelor's degree in computer science from Wake Forest University and went on to receive her doctorate from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

"When I was a student, I enjoyed the atmosphere at Argonne. I still do," Norris said. "It is very open, and the opportunity for group collaboration is appealing." Also appealing to Norris is the relative freedom researchers have to pursue the projects they find challenging.

No longer the student, Norris now supervises several students each summer at various levels, including college undergraduates and graduates and recent high-school graduates. "I want them to feel the way I did as a student, that doing research in this atmosphere is very rewarding," she said.

Her outreach extends further, however. She recently received funding from the National Science Foundation for a project to focus on women and minorities starting at the middle-school level. The plan is to hire a female undergraduate majoring in mathematics or science education. Norris and the selected undergraduate will then interact with a local middle-school teacher and class. The idea is twofold: improve science education and create role models for female students. "We want to reach these young people before they've begun teaching," Norris said.

"There are a lot of wrong perceptions among middle- and high-school students," Norris said. "To make informed choices, they need to know that one can be a woman and have a family and still do research." And Norris should know. The mother of a six-year-old son and three-year-old daughter, she is expecting her third child this fall.

"I think the biggest mistake women might make is assuming the combination of motherhood and a career won't work out,” Norris said. “Some women might be afraid having children will kill their careers, but it hasn't killed my career yet, nor those of several female colleagues."