Throughout her career, computer scientist and Distinguished Member of Technical Staff Kathryn Mohror has been drawn to roles that involve collaboration, believing that the best, most enduring results are achieved when people work together toward common goals. Since joining Lawrence Livermore in 2010, she has been a member of the Laboratory’s Center for Advanced Scientific Computing (CASC), contributing to efforts to deliver innovative, faster, and more efficient input/output (I/O) and data management processes for HPC systems—an indispensable part of realizing functional exascale computing—and serving as a mentor and leader in the HPC field.
On the technical side, Kathryn is a driving force in scalable fault-tolerant computing and data management techniques. She says, “I/O is essential to the practical use of supercomputers. Efficient data management gives us better performance and is critical to obtaining faster results.” In 2019, Kathryn and colleagues received an R&D 100 Award for the scalable/checkpoint restart (SCR) framework. That same year, she was recognized with the prestigious DOE Early Career Research Program (ECRP) Award, which provided funding for five years to pursue pure research in her field. ECRP enabled her to establish connections with universities, expand the workforce pipeline through postdoctoral hires, and guide efforts to deeply understand I/O use cases on HPC systems and build tailored support for them.
ECRP and the opportunity to participate in the Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Exascale Computing Project(ECP, 2016–2023), opened doors for her to grow technically and professionally. “ECP was transformative for me,” says Kathryn, who was an integral part of the UnifyFS project team, and later also managed ECP’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) software technologies portfolio. “I’m extremely proud of the work we accomplished with UnifyFS, maturing it from an idea with minimal prototype code into a full-scale production system,” she says. “I also learned how a huge interlaboratory project operates and how to better enable the work of researchers across the DOE complex.”
Building Bridges: One Role at a Time
Over the years, Kathryn has dovetailed each career opportunity into the next to promote what has become a key objective: “I’m passionate about making scientific research easier to accomplish at the national laboratories and supporting engagement between them to improve outcomes and make positive impacts.” Toward that end, for the last two years, in addition to her Computing duties, she has served as one of two deputy directors for LLNL’s Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) Program, helping streamline policies and processes to facilitate research efforts.
During her tenure, she was instrumental in developing an Interlaboratory LDRD Program, which allows scientists from different national laboratories to collaborate on specific projects. “The laboratories have expertise in different areas. This program provides a way to combine our strengths to achieve more holistic results.” Colleagues at Los Alamos and Sandia national laboratories helped develop the framework, and after obtaining the necessary approvals, the first set of projects kicked off in January 2024. Since then, the list of collaborators has expanded to include NNSA, Office of Science, and Office of Environmental Management laboratories. The second round of projects are under way, and the call for 2026 proposals went out in July 2025. “We’re excited to see what can be accomplished through these new partnerships.” Kathryn s interest in implementing the Interlaboratory LDRD Program grew out of her time as an Oppenheimer fellow in 2022. “As a fellow, I had the opportunity to visit several national laboratories and met many wonderful people who had such zeal for their unique scientific work. It gave me a sense of the magnitude of the one-of-kind science being conducted in our DOE laboratories,” she says. “I loved the national laboratory system before I participated in the program, but through this experience, I fell head over heels. I saw all the possibilities of what we could achieve with greater collaboration.”
The Future Looks Bright…and Engaging
Kathryn’s ability to combine technical acumen and passion for mission to foster engagement and advance scientific research has yielded fruitful results. In addition to her previous accolades, she was recognized in 2022 as one of twelve scientists and engineers named to Lawrence Livermore’s annual Early and Mid-Career Recognition Program. Then, in 2024, she, along with her colleagues at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, received an R&D 100 Award for UnifyFS. Later that year, she was also honored by the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on High-Performance Computing with the Emerging Woman Leader in Technical Computing Award, recognizing her outstanding work in HPC and her service and mentorship within the HPC community.
In March 2025, Kathryn was selected as CASC’s new division leader, overseeing one of the world’s foremost research organizations in computational science and providing technical leadership and management in the areas of applied mathematics, computer science, and data science. As the need for more powerful supercomputing capabilities and faster, more efficient data management grows, Kathryn is focused on the big picture. “I want to push the boundaries of what we can achieve technically in the I/O space to expedite results for mission-critical research, while pursuing directions for how we can better facilitate scientific research at all the national laboratories. I have a real interest in bringing people together and in the outcomes we can achieve through the power of exchanging ideas.”
--Caryn Meissner