• Office Address: Oak Ridge National Laboratory
• E-mail: tsamuel@utk.edu

Research Assistant Professor Tabitha Samuel is the Interim Director and HPC Operations Group Leader at the National Institute for Computational Sciences at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She has over 16 years of experience in advanced research computing, spanning user support and systems programming to executing and advancing the overall vision and mission of a nationally recognized supercomputing center. An active Research Computing and Data (RCD) community member, Samuel is co-PI of the Building Research Innovation at Community Colleges (BRICCs)-Pathways NSF award, focusing on creating meaningful pathways for collaborative research computing between community colleges and research-intensive R1 universities. Other NSF projects she leads include introducing the NAIRR program to Tennessee researchers (TN-THRIVE), and instrumenting MPI for AI workloads (MPI4AI). She is also the co-founder of Tennessee Research, Education, and Computing Collaborative (TRECC), a platform for collaboration and regional advancement in cyberinfrastructure for RCD professionals in Tennessee. Samuel also serves on the Position Committee of the Coalition for Academic Super Computing. She is also the chair of the ACM Practice and Experiences in Advanced Research Computing (PEARC) Conference Series, and will be a co-general chair of the PEARC26 conference.

Samuel also serves as the Director for AI Enablement at the AI Tennessee Initiative. In this role, she is responsible for enabling the effective use and coordination of AI capabilities across the university’s priority initiatives, working in close collaboration with campus and state partners.

Samuel earned her PhD in computer science from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where her research focused on using natural language processing techniques to improve vocabulary comprehension and retention in children. In her free time, Samuel loves to go on awe-inspiring adventures around the world (using miles and points, of course!), and play tabletop RPGs.