Bio
Dr. Georgia Tourassi is the Associate Laboratory Director of the Computing and Computational Sciences Directorate at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). Concurrently, she holds appointments as an Adjunct Professor of Radiology at Duke University and as a joint UT-ORNL Professor of the Bredesen Center Data Science Program at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. Under her leadership, the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility delivered Frontier in 2022, the world’s first exascale computing system dedicated to open science.
Her scholarly work includes 13 US patents and innovation disclosures, 2 R&D 100 awards, and more than 260 peer-reviewed journal articles, conference proceedings articles, editorials, and book chapters. She is an elected Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE), the American Association of Medical Physicists (AAPM), the International Society for Optics and Photonics (SPIE), and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
Her research interests include high performance computing and artificial intelligence in biomedicine. For her leadership in the Joint Design of Advanced Computing Solutions for Cancer initiative, she received the DOE Secretary’s Appreciation Award in 2016. DOE has also recognized Gina's contributions to HPC leadership with 4 DOE Secretary's Honor Awards for her contributions to the COVID-19 Insights Partnership Team (2021), the COVID-19 HPC Resource Team (2021), Driving US Competitiveness and Innovation in HPC/AI team (2022), and the Frontier project (2024). Locally, she has been honored by the YWCA Knoxville for STEM mentorship of underrepresented groups and the UT-Battelle Distinguished Researcher Award and the ORNL Director’s Award for Outstanding Individual Accomplishment in Science and Technology in 2017.
Tourassi holds a B.S. in Physics from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, and a Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from Duke University.