Our hardware is exciting but our people are more than that
The Pawsey Supercomputing Centre is what it is, because of its world-class expertise.
Without its knowledgable staff, the Centre would not have its reputation of excelling and advancing Australian science.
Aditi is driven by a passion for uniting communities, solving intricate problems, and forging connections between seemingly disparate concepts.
Aditi’s role centres on fostering collaborations that harness supercomputing’s potential and bringing together diverse minds to tackle complex scientific challenges. Aditi loves unravelling puzzles and weaving patterns, while advocating for the transformative power of interdisciplinary innovation.
Ann Backhaus is the Education and Training Manager at Pawsey. She seeks to accelerate researcher’s discoveries through the Pawsey User Training Program. In addition, Ann helps build Australia’s next generation of scientists through the Internship Program, summer schools, and STEM outreach – underpinned with an extensive network of Partners. Ann also keeps Pawsey staff upskilled in current and future-looking technologies as well as essential skills, which contribute to Pawsey’s “friendly vibe”. Check out what we’re doing in Training & HPC in quantum, AI, ML and more on our website pawsey.org.au/news-and-events/
Ann has significant experience in adult teaching and learning, and in training program design, development, and management. Her experience spans numerous industries and sectors, including government, academia, and private enterprise.
With a background in project management, Christianne has managed a variety of consultancy projects and events for clients in both Australia and the UK.
As Pawsey’s Executive Officer, Christianne supports the Pawsey Board and Leadership Team in areas of governance, strategy, operations and reporting.
Karina Nunez has been part of the Pawsey team for over 10 years, and it has been a journey, focusing on STEM, government relationships, and engaging researchers at scale. Karina has played a pivotal role in building and expanding the Pawsey Brand and demystifying supercomputing for a wider audience.
She is an expert visual communicator whose passion for science and technology has seamlessly blended with her role in promoting Australia’s scientific supercomputing.
As a Pawsey representative, Karina has played a role in forging connections with international partners, fostering strong relationships for Pawsey with its users, and championing supercomputing with the support of researchers and universities.
Her mission? To seamlessly connect the dots between science, technology, and advocacy.
Mark is a research executive with more than 20 years’ experience working at a senior level in innovative research and business development roles in complex, multi-stakeholder environments. Through national and international programs and joint-ventures, Mark had successfully led initiatives to accelerate the impact of research, development and education programs for Australia’s key energy, mining and agricultural sectors.
He is a former Chief Executive of an LNG research and development alliance of CSIRO, Curtin University and UWA, partnering with Chevron, Woodside and Shell. Prior to his appointment at Pawsey Mark led the innovation and industry engagement portfolio at The University of Western Australia. In addition, Mark is the current Chair of the Board of All Saints’ College and was appointed an adjunct Senior Fellow of the Perth USAsia Centre (an international policy think tank) in 2017.
With 15 years of project management experience in the mining industry, particularly managing major upgrades to mining railway signalling and control systems, Stacy has already seen almost every problem that can potentially derail a big project.
In her role, Stacy will bring a diverse group of people together to deliver a system that meets both the user and technical requirements.
A key part of Stacy’s planning is managing the change from existing systems to the new systems while minimising any impact on current Pawsey users. This requires staging the installation works and allowing time to migrate users onto new systems, while ensuring the new systems can simultaneously meet the needs of existing users, and emerging future users.
Coming from an engineering background, Stacy is particularly enthusiastic about the scientific developments that are being advanced using Pawsey facilities
Mr Varetto is an accomplished manager and computational scientist.
His focus is on data-intensive high-performance computing, large scale parallel I/O and accelerators. He has held key roles in significant research projects, such as the EU funded ‘Human Brain Project’, has contributed to numerous projects with the European supercomputing infrastructure and has worked in commercial companies and government and academic institutions in the USA, Europe and Australia.
Mr Varetto has been developing GPU-accelerated scientific software since 2006 and is currently working on designing scalable scientific computing solutions on hybrid CPU/GPU systems and implementing large scale real-time data processing and visualisation workflows, while supporting international research projects such as the Square Kilometre Array (SKA).