Georgia Tourassi

Georgia (Gina) Tourassi is the Director of the National Center for Computational Sciences and the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. She joined ORNL in 2011 as the director of the Biomedical Sciences and Engineering Center after a long academic career in the department of radiology and the medical physics graduate program at Duke University Medical Center. In addition, she is an adjunct professor of radiology at Duke University and the University of Tennessee Graduate School of Medicine, joint UT-ORNL faculty of Mechanical, Aerospace, and Biomedical Engineering at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville and the Bredesen Center.

Dr. Tourassi’s research background and interests are in artificial intelligence, scalable data-driven biomedical discovery, high-performance computing, clinical decision support, and human-computer interaction. Her scholarly work includes more than 250 peer-reviewed journal articles, conference proceedings articles, book chapters, editorials, and conference abstracts (https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=O_0diUoAAAAJ&hl=en) as well as 15 invention disclosures and patents. Her research work has been funded by NIH, DOE, VA, DOD, and various foundations. Dr. Tourassi is a member of several scientific societies with extensive service records, has chaired an international medical imaging conference, serves on the technical committees of biomedical informatics, AI, and scientific computing conferences and workshops, and has prepared educational material and refresher courses. She has been recognized as a leading expert in her fields of expertise by being appointed Charter member of NIH Study sections and being elected member of the FDA Advisory Committee and review panel on Computer-Aided Diagnosis Devices. She is elected Fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE), the American Association of Physicists in Medicine (AAPM), the International Society for Optics and Photonics (SPIE), and the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences (AAAS). She is also senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the International Neural Network Society (INNS).

In the past few years Tourassi has been directly involved with the DOE-NCI and DOE-VA partnerships announced by Vice President Biden in 2016 on the deployment of exascale computing to enable precision medicine advances for cancer and the US Veterans. For her leadership in the Joint Design of Advanced Computing Solutions for Cancer initiative, she received the DOE Secretary’s Appreciation Award in 2016 and the HPCwire Readers’ and Editors’ Choice Award for “Best Use of AI” in 2017. In addition, in 2017 Dr. Tourassi received the ORNL Director’s Award for Outstanding Individual Accomplishment in Science and Technology and the UT-Battelle Distinguished Researcher Award. In 2020, Dr. Tourassi received the DOE’s Secretary Honors Award for her contributions to the COVID-19 Insights Partnership Team and to the COVID-19 HPC Resource Team.

Tourassi holds a B.S. in Physics from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, and a Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from Duke University.