Dr. Sandra Diaz

Sandra Diaz Pier was born in Mexico where she obtained a bachelor in electronic systems engineering and a masters in computer science with focus on machine learning and quantum computing. She also worked in industry as quality assurance leader and as software developer for several years. In 2011 she moved to Ontario, Canada to get a second masters in electrical engineering. In 2014 she moved to Germany to work as graduate researcher at the Simulation and Data Lab Neuroscience (SDLN) at the Jülich Supercomputing Centre at Forschungszentrum Jülich, Germany. At the SDLN, she started working at the interface between neuroscience and high performance computing doing methodological research and providing support to domain scientists. At the same time she did her PhD in computer science which she completed in 2021. In 2023 Sandra Diaz was appointed as scientific leader of the SDLN. Her research focus is on high performance computing, simulation of brain dynamics and plasticity at different scales, and optimization. She has participated in several EU projects including the Human Brain Project (HBP), Virtual Brain Cloud, eBrain-Health, Virtual Brain Twin and EBRAINS 2.0. She participated as task leader in the infrastructure work package of the HBP, member of the High level support steering committee and active collaborator in the technical coordination and education programme of the project. She continues to be involved in education and training activities in context of the EBRAINS RI. She is contributor to open source codes like the NEST simulator (https://github.com/nest/nest-simulator), The Virtual Brain (https://github.com/the-virtual-brain), and L2L (https://github.com/Meta-optimization/L2L).