Who we are

Annika Hagemeier started her carreer in HPC in 2002 with a dual study program at Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC), Forschungszentrum Jülich, Germany. She finished this program as a “Mathematical-Technical Assistant” (MaTA) and with a pre-diploma in Technomathematics in 2005. She continued studying Technomathematics at FH Aachen, University of Applied Sciences, while working as a part-time employee in the Simulation Lab Molecular Systems at JSC. In her diploma and master theses she evaluated how different hardware architectures like FPGAs and the Cell Broadband Engine can be efficiently used for molecular dynamics simulations.

After finishing her master studies in 2009 she worked as a scientist at JSC in the Computational Science Division. Since many years, she gives lectures in parallel programming for prospective mathematical-technical software developers in collaboration with the FH Aachen. 

She is currently a member of the Simulation and Data Laboratory Astronomie and Astrophysics where she works on facilitating the usage of astronomical simulation codes on the JSC HPC systems.

As a mother of two children and a part-time employee she experienced how difficult the combination of work and family really is, especially for women. As one of the family ambassadors at FZJ she is a first point of contact for questions concerning the reconciliation of family and career. As a member of the JuWinHPC management board she is interested in increasing the acceptance of part-time employees. Making it possible, not even for women, but for parents in general, to make a career in HPC although they want to accompanying their children on their journey through life in the extent they need it would be a strong wish for her.

Anke Kreuzer started at the Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC) in 2009 in the division “Technical Systems and Services,” with the MaTSE (Mathematical Technical Software Developer) apprenticeship as part of the dual study programme Scientific Programming at FH Aachen. After receiving the Bachelor’s degree and completing the apprenticeship in 2012, she continued working part-time at JSC while pursuing her Master’s degree, which she obtained in 2014.

After this she joined the DEEP project family, where she later became a work package leader in the DEEP-EST project and a member of the Project Management Team. Following her maternity leave in 2019, she started to work in the EasyBuild core team at JSC. In 2025, she additionally became part of the MaTSE education group to lecture the trainees in linear algebra.

Working in a field still largely dominated by men, it is essential to foster change and create a more inclusive environment. With the JuWinHPC network, we aim to support other women in feeling confident and empowered in the HPC community and to inspire more girls and women to pursue careers in MINT (STEM) fields.

Stefan Krieg's journey into high-performance computing (HPC) began while working on his master's thesis (still "Diplom" in 2003), when he decided to learn more about particle physics, quantum field theory, and modern computing — a combination that can be achieved in the field of lattice quantum field theory. After earning his Ph.D. in this field from Bergische Universität Wuppertal and postdoctoral fellowships at MIT and Wuppertal, he joined JSC in 2011 to lead the newly formed Simulation Laboratory for Nuclear and Particle Physics, now known as the SDL Numerical Quantum Field Theory. Since 2021, he has been a professor of physics at the Helmholtz Institute for Radiation and Nuclear Physics at the University of Bonn. Currently, he heads JSC’s division, "HPC for Quantum Systems."

The group has expanded its research portfolio beyond particle physics to include lower-dimensional systems, which serve as ideal testing grounds for developing new methods, particularly those employing AI/DL. Further activities include developing a research data management infrastructure for the community, such as the LDG/ILDG, and analyzing new architectures to assess their suitability for the community's needs.

As a father, Stefan would like to see all options open to young girls and aspiring female scientists (which extends to anyone, regardless of how they identify). Although he is glad to work at a very accepting institute and in an equally accepting scientific field, where what you do matters and not how you look doing it, it is clear that female researchers are still heavily underrepresented. Ensuring that obstacles to entering HPC and MINT occupations can be identified and efficiently removed requires efforts at all career stages, ideally starting at a young age. Hence, Stefan enthusiastically participates in the Girls' Day initiative, which aims to reach high school students. He strives to create a welcoming and supportive environment for young students at the university and within in the SDL. With the JuWinHPC chapter, women already active in the field get an excellent networking and support opportunity, which he, therefore, gladly supports.

Anna Lührs joined the Jülich Supercomputing Centre, Forschungszentrum Jülich, as trainee in the „Mathematical-Technical Software Developer“ (MaTSE) programme in 2008, through which she also obtained her Bachelors degree in „Scientific Programming“ in 2011. She kept working there in part-time while studying Technomathematics, focusing on any HPC(-related) subject she could find in the curriculum, and successfully defended her Master thesis about image registration for medical images on a GPU cluster in collaboration with the INM-1 in 2013. After that, she joined the „High Performance Computing in Neuroscience“ division, for which she acted as deputy lead from 2015 until 2023.

Rather accidentally, when substituting a colleague during her parental leave, Anna discovered her passion and talent for project management, science coordination and communication. Since 2014, she worked a project manager and science coordinator in the EU-funded Human Brain Project, in which the JSC had a leading role since the beginning. This project has significantly moved the neuroscience community forward in using HPC in the last decade. When the HBP was coming to an end in 2023, Anna joined the newly established "Office for (inter)national coordination and networking" at the JSC, again also as deputy lead.

Anna has always been very active in trying to convince more girls and women to study MINT subjects or to enter the computing and HPC community. Being the mother of a young child, she is even more interested in finding allies and building a network to work towards a better balance between work and family life (which benefits not just for parents but for anyone). Therefore, she was very excited to learn about the plans to establish JuWinHPC and also joined the management board. Having so few women around, it is even more important to connect and network among each other.

Cristina Manzano studied telecommunications engineering at the Polytechnic University of Valencia (UPV) in Spain and obtained her master's degree from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim.

Since 2009, she has been employed at Forschungszentrum Jülich in Germany, working in the "Technical Systems and Services" division of the Jülich Supercomputing Centre. As a data and file system expert, she has contributed to various European projects, such as EUDAT and the DEEP projects. Cristina was part of the core team that initially developed the LOFAR Long Term Archive in Jülich. She continues to work on the day-to-day operations of this archive, focusing on optimizations, I/O research, and data challenges, and currently leads the Operation & Development Team "Technical Services".

Cristina has been long interested in the problem of the underrepresentation of women in science and the balance between work and family, and was really happy to learn about the organization Women in HPC from other colleagues and help in the founding of the local chapter JuWinHPC.

She sees this as an opportunity to actively make a difference: to understand the challenges women face in science and work towards addressing them.

Cristina also recently joined the organization team of Forschungszentrum's Jülich network Female Voice, which not only aims to strengthen women’s networking but also proactively address topics that support gender equality at Jülich.

Dr. Ruth Partzsch is working at Jülich Supercomputing Centre, Forschungszentrum Jülich, Germany. 

She studied Mathematics at RWTH Aachen University and is also trained as a mathematical-technical software developer. She is specialized in numerical mathematics and has developed a particular interest in semi-implicit time-stepping methods for differential equations. During her PhD time (2016-2021) she worked together with the Technical University of Dresden, Germany, in the field of parallel-in-time integration methods for partial differential equations. During a subsequent postdoc position (2021-2022) she was involved in a project that uses reinforcement learning to optimize numerical preconditioning in this field. Currently she is working as team leader of the ATML "Advanced Time Integrators". 

In collaboration with the FH Aachen, University of Applied Sciences, Germany she holds mathematical lectures for prospective mathematical-technical software developers. 

As a leader of the Joint Laboratory for Extreme Scale Computing she is particularly interested in promoting young talents. In addition, the topic of underrepresentation of women and the compatibility of work and family is particularly important to her. She strongly advocates equal opportunities and diversity.

Ruth had her first contact with the organization Women in HPC at the ISC workshop in 2016. Because until then she had only had contact with male colleagues, she was inspired to experience women in high career positions and was able to build up a network that helped her in her own career. She would like to pass on this experience to other women and has therefore founded together with other colleagues the local WHPC Chapter "JuWinHPC" in the name of Forschungszentrum Jülich.

Maria Petrova-El Sayed entered the vast and challenging world of high-performance computing (HPC) in early 2013. After completing her Master’s degree in Informatics and Management in Austria in 2011, her professional path soon led her to Germany, where she joined Forschungszentrum Jülich in 2013 as a full-stack software developer in the “Large-Scale Data Science” division. There, she contributed to numerous Software-as-a-Service projects aimed at making HPC more accessible and reducing barriers for domain researchers.

Over time, Maria developed a strong interest in (IT) project management. In 2024, she joined the Simulation and Data Lab “Applied Machine Learning,” where she now supports the coordination of several projects in the field of artificial intelligence.

Maria became part of the JuWinHPC organizing team shortly after returning from maternity leave. As a mother of two, she deeply values a healthy balance between professional and personal life. She strongly believes that a supportive and inclusive work environment enables everyone to grow together and plays a key role in encouraging and retaining more women in science and STEM fields.

Sarra Refai joined the HPC world at Forschungszentrum Jülich and more specifically at JSC in April 2025, her first full-time position after completing her studies. She holds a Master’s degree in Software Engineering from Tunisia and gained international research experience in Vancouver through a Mitacs internship at the UBC CIRRUS Lab, where she worked on cloud and serverless systems. Passionate about cloud computing, HPC and learning new technologies, Sarra enjoys turning complex problems into efficient solutions. Beyond tech, she has always been engaged in volunteering and community work, especially initiatives that support minorities and give them visibility. Working in a field still largely dominated by men, she believes it is essential to foster change and help create a more inclusive environment. She is also currently tackling the German language — with mixed results, effort, and a good sense of humor about it.

Estela Suarez studied Physics at the University of Oviedo and specialized in Astrophysics at the University Complutense of Madrid, both in Spain. She moved then to Switzerland, where she analysed satellite data from a solar X-ray telescope at Paul Scherrer Institut and then completed her PhD about X-ray polarization at the University of Geneva. After many years doing computing programming for Astrophysics, she moved to the field of HPC in 2010, when she joined the Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC) at Forschungszentrum Jülich, Germany. Since 2022 she is also Professor of High Performance Computing at the Institute of Computer Science from University of Bonn.

Estela’s Research Group “Next Generation Architectures and Prototypes” focuses on HPC system architecture and codesign at both system and processor level. As leader of the DEEP project series she has driven the development of the Modular Supercomputing Architecture, including hardware, software and application implementation. Additionally, she leads the codesign and validation efforts within the European Processor Initiative (EPI). With her wide field of knowledge in HPC, she has been called for advice in various review and expert panels, including the Research and Innovation Advisory Group (RIAG) from EuroHPC JU.

As a young leader in a male-dominated field, Estela has frequently been the “only one woman in the room”, and has experienced the impact of unconscious bias in the relation with peers. Willing to improve the situation, she contributes to many initiatives striving for increasing the number of women in STEM fields, including workshops and meetings to share experiences with school girls and young scientists at early stages of their careers. She was part of the funding members of JuWinHPC, aiming at increasing the visibility of female contribution to the field.

Claire Wyatt is the Community Manager for Research Software Engineering at FZJ. Originally from the UK, she moved to Germany in October 2022 to work on bringing together Research Software Engineers (RSEs) to collaborate and share best practice. She is passionate about diversity in academia and was keen to join the JuWinHPC to get involved.

Brian J. N. Wylie “I joined Women in HPC and support the local chapter because in my advancing years I’ve become crazed, and the folks here have accepted my craziness (so far).”