STEM Shoutout: Dr. Ylva Pihlström

Dr. Ylva Pihlström, a professor in the UNM Department of Physics and Astronomy, was recently named the new associate director of The Center for Advanced Research Computing (CARC) at UNM.

“Working with CARC is a way to partake in the ongoing development and improvement of the UNM research infrastructure, including high performance computing,” Pihlström said. 

CARC is “the hub of computational research at UNM and one of the largest computing centers in the State of New Mexico. It is an interdisciplinary community that uses computational resources to create new research insights. The goal is to lead and grow the computational research community at UNM,” according to their website.

As new associate director, one of  Pihlström’s main goals is to “map the needs of UNM researchers in the areas of HPC, networking and data storage solutions in order to guide our research infrastructure planning process.”

“The continuous development of new techniques and research facilities is enabling new science questions to be addressed, and at the same time the resulting data sets are growing in both size and complexity, requiring HPC and data archival solutions,” she said. “If you want to optimize the matching of resources with applications, you need a healthy mix of computing technology savvy people and research oriented scientists from the field.”

Pihlström said she is most looking forward to connecting with researchers and working with CARC staff to build future capabilities including data acquisition through computing and storage to provide the best possible HPC services. 

“I welcome potential, as well as experienced, UNM HPC users to contact me to discuss how CARC can help them achieve their research goals,” Pihlström said.