Elizabeth Leake is an external relations specialist and storyteller. After serving 20 years in communications and technology administration roles at public universities, Leake joined the US National Science Foundation’s TeraGrid project in 2008. As TeraGrid’s first external relations coordinator, she led a nationally-distributed team of communicators who chronicled research discoveries that were enabled by the public investment in advanced cyberinfrastructure. Her stories have been featured by HPCwire, International Science Grid This Week (iSGTW/ScienceNode), InsideHPC, the Chicago Council on Global Affairs Global Food for Thought blog and others.
In 2012, Leake founded STEM-Trek, a global, grassroots nonprofit organization that supports travel, mentoring and high performance computing (HPC) workforce development opportunities for scholars from underrepresented groups and regions. Through STEM-Trek’s NGO platform, Leake serves as an industry voice and advocate for HPC-curious scholars everywhere.
Leake’s interest in global eInfrastructure was ignited when she served as a point facilitator for DEISA/PRACE and TeraGrid/XSEDE HPC Summer Schools in Catania, Italy and South Lake Tahoe, California in the US. She has since organized many more advanced skills workshops, and as a correspondent has covered a variety of technical meetings and conferences, including U.S. Open Science Grid All Hands meetings; European Grid Infrastructure (EGEE/EGI) Community Forums; South African Center for High Performance Computing (CHPC) national meetings; the First International Conference on the Internet, Cybersecurity and Information Systems in Gaborone, Botswana; and the Southern African Development Community (SADC) HPC Forums. In 2018, she is covering PRACEdays18 (for HPCwire) in Ljubljana, Slovenia; the HPC Knowledge Meeting in Barcelona, Spain; the International Supercomputing Conference in Frankfurt, Germany; the International Data Week/SciDataCon conference in Gaborone, Botswana; and the South African Centre for HPC National Meeting in Cape Town, South Africa.
Leake’s HPC Knowledge Meeting presentation is titled, “Chasing Unicorns in the Global Gig Economy.” She will share strategies to recruit, retain and foster teams that possess the hard and soft skills necessary to support advanced technologies, while serving the ever-diversifying communities of practice who rely on HPC and data science to power transformative discoveries.