Valerie Taylor (computer scientist)


Valerie E. Taylor is an American computer scientist who is the director of the Mathematics and Computer Science Division of Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. Her research includes topics such as performance analysis, power analysis, and resiliency. She is known for her work on "Prophesy," described as "a database used to collect and analyze data to predict the performance on different applications on parallel systems."

Education and Work

Taylor received her bachelor's and master's degrees in electrical engineering from Purdue University in 1985 and 1986, respectively. In 1991, Taylor received her PhD at the University of California, Berkeley in electrical engineering and computer science under advisor David Messerschmitt. She holds a patent for her dissertation work on sparse matrices. Shortly after her PhD in 1993, Taylor earned an NSF National Young Investigator Award. She was a faculty member of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at Northwestern University for 11 years.
From 2003 until 2011, she joined the Texas A&M University faculty as the Head of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, working on high performance computing. There, she served as the senior associate dean of academic affairs in the College of Engineering and a Regents Professor and the Royce E. Wisenbaker Professor in the Department of Computer Science. She also began the Industries Affiliates Program which allows academics to engage industry partners.
While on the faculty of both Northwestern and Texas A&M, Taylor collaborated with research with Argonne National Laboratory, including a summer sabbatical in 2011. As of July 3, 2017, she is the director of the Mathematics and Science Division of Argonne in Illinois. At Argonne, she cowrote the Department of Energy's comprehensive AI for Science report based on a series of Town Hall meetings.
Taylor is the CEO & President of the Center for Minorities and People with Disabilities in IT. The organization seeks to develop the participation of minorities and people with disabilities in the IT workforce in the United States.

Awards and Honors

Taylor has received numerous awards for distinguished research, leadership, and efforts to increase diversity in computing. She has authored or co-authored more than 100 papers in the area of high performance computing, with a focus on performance analysis and modeling of parallel scientific applications. Her awards include:
In 2013, Taylor was elected a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers "for contributions to performance enhancement of parallel computing applications", and in 2016 as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery for her "leadership in broadening participation in computing." In 2019, she was named an Argonne Distinguished Fellow, an award which represents only three percent of research staff at the facility.
Taylor is featured in the Notable Women in Computing cards.