Purdue Women in HPC to host Northwestern research computing executive talk on building diverse teams

Purdue’s Women in High-Performance Computing (WHPC) group will host Jackie Milhans, manager of research computing services at Northwestern University, from noon to 1 p.m. on Feb. 27 in Rawls Hall, Room 2077.

Milhans’ presentation “How to Develop Diverse Teams for Increased Innovation and Productivity” will explore the topic of diversity and inclusion as it relates to recruitment and building effective, innovative and successful teams. She will share simple ways to enhance the hiring process to attract diverse talent, how to work with a team to create a more inclusive culture and how to ensure that opportunities are more equitable.

The event is free and open to anyone in the Purdue community. Those planning to attend should register here.

At Northwestern, Milhans has built and developed a diverse high-performing team. Her responsibilities include providing researcher support for high-performance computing, cloud environments, data science, data workflows and data visualization. She has a passion for learning and sharing methods for building and leading effective, engaged and diverse teams through improved hiring and management practices. She serves on several steering committees and working groups in support of higher education IT and research computing in organizations such as EDUCAUSE and the Campus Research Computing Consortium (CaRCC).

Her academic background is in materials science engineering and computer science, with a focus on developing and employing multi-scale modeling, homogenization models for multi-phase materials and using statistical models to predict overall mechanical, microstructure and thermal properties in materials. She has a bachelor’s degree from Carnegie Mellon University, a doctorate from the Georgia Institute of Technology and completed a postdoc at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

For more information, contact Marisa Brazil, program manager for Research Computing, brazil@purdue.edu.

Writer:  Adrienne Miller, science and technology writer, Information Technology at Purdue (ITaP), 765-496-8204, mill2027@purdue.edu

Last updated: February 19, 2019