Valeria Barra

Born in Naples, and raised in the rolling hills of Siena, in the beautiful Tuscany region, Dr. Barra earned her Bachelor of Science and Master of Science degrees in Mathematical Sciences from the University of Siena, Italy. At the end of her Master's program, Dr. Barra won a fellowship that awarded her a full-ride scholarship for one year at the New Jersey Institute of Technology for study and research. After her exchange program, Dr. Barra pursued a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics at the same host institution, from which she graduated in 2018. During her Ph.D. program, Dr. Barra also took the opportunity to gain industrial research experience, by joining the research team at Pixar Animation Studios, in Emeryville, California for a research internship. Shortly after gaining her Ph.D., Dr. Barra joined the University of Colorado at Boulder as a Postdoctoral Research Associate. She worked in the Center for Efficient Exascale Discretizations, a co-design center within the U.S. Exascale Computing Project (ECP). The effort of this co-design center is to prepare efficient software products capable of exploiting the heterogeneous architectures of the current and nextgeneration exascale supercomputers. Since October 2020, Dr. Barra has worked at Caltech, in the Climate Modeling Alliance (CliMA), a coalition of scientists, engineers, and applied mathematicians from Caltech, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory that leverages recent advances in the computational and data sciences to build a novel climate model. CliMA aims at providing the accurate and actionable scientific information needed to face the current and coming climate changes and mitigate public safety risks