Building Community: Rising Stars in Computational and Data Sciences Annual Workshop

After being steeped in focused research for years, life beyond obtaining a Ph.D. begins to emerge – including answering the question of ‘What’s next?’ Enter Rising Stars in Computational and Data Sciences – an annual two-day workshop built for early career attendees to make new connections and familiarize themselves with career opportunities in academia and industry.

In its sixth year, 28 attendees participated in the 2025 workshop, held April 22 – 23 at the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences at The University of Texas at Austin. 

In addition to the Oden Institute, event partners include Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos, and Sandia National Laboratories. The workshop incorporates interactive panels on topics ranging from refining communications skills, writing grant proposals, and academic and research career pathways. It also provides a venue for attendees to present their research and receive constructive feedback on their presentations. 

The research presentations provide a window on the breadth of scientific questions attendees are exploring. The interactive environment employed by the Rising Stars workshop helps foster networking and relationship-building among participants. One such relationship that began during the 2022 Rising Stars Workshop has flourished into a collaboration uniting academia and industry.

Amelia Henriksen and Elizabeth (Liz) Newman recounted their first meeting.

“While at the 2022 Rising Stars, I listened to Liz’s presentation and she did a fantastic job, Admittedly, in addition to her presentation, one of the reasons I particularly noticed Liz was she was one of the few other people wearing a mask – something we had in common,” she said, noting the in-between time of the pandemic. “The pandemic wasn't totally over, and I recall commenting, ‘Oh, hey, we're mask buddies!’” 

That turned out to be the beginning of their friendship and professional collaboration. Amelia is now a senior member of the technical staff at Sandia National Labs in the Machine Intelligence and Visualization Organization. She completed her Ph.D. at the Oden Institute at UT and then went to Sandia in 2021 initially as the S. Scott Collis Data Science Fellow. She has been in her current position since 2023. Elizabeth, who received her Ph.D. at Tufts University in 2019, completed her postdoctoral research at Emory University, where she is now an assistant professor in the Department of Mathematics.

“At Rising Stars, Amelia blew me out of the water with her presentation - she had so much energy and her research demonstrated a completely different way of thinking,” said Elizabeth. Later that same year they met again, both presenting at another conference. 

“Liz had been doing work with tensors and tensor decompositions, and a lot of mathematical underpinnings for the data that goes into the kind of problems I work on with machine learning and algorithm development. I was aware she'd already been thinking about this relationship between data and algorithms,” said Amelia.

Fast forward to 2024. Amelia was asked to be the Principal Investigator for one of the programs at Sandia. The project: to work on the specific problem of benchmarking on important national security problems that would still be shareable with the academic and industrial community. 

This led Amelia to question how she could identify and work on benchmarking areas that would be both safe to release and mutually beneficial to not only the lab, but also to academia and industry and Amelia immediately thought of Elizabeth. “There are national security problems, many of which can't be solved by just our teams alone. We want to bring in perspectives from researchers outside of Sandia.”

The team identified two specific benchmark thrusts: maritime benchmarking to analyze and detect ship track anomalies, and nanoindentation, which is a technique used to measure critical mechanical properties of materials like hardness. In maritime, an anomaly example is when a ship goes off track due to an emergency – such as a distress signal from another ship. 

Their work has caught the attention of the manufacturing industry, specifically Bruker, who is one of the leading manufacturers of nanoindenter machines. “They are very excited about what we are doing and have given us their state-of-the-art data sets to work with in addition to the ones we’ve curated,” said Amelia. The team plans to release their research results in an open format via Sandia’s Github later in 2025.

“Amelia's done a fantastic job leading this team project at Sandia. It's been great seeing a peer from Rising Stars and watching what a strong leader she is,” said Elizabeth.

They both agreed the Rising Stars workshop served as a great introduction point, and for Elizabeth, coming out of COVID, it was one of the first opportunities she had as a postdoc to connect with other academics as well as national labs. However, even more than networking, being among young voices and peers proved instrumental. “Getting to share our research but also ask questions in an inviting environment where we were able to interact in organic ways was really liberating, and it provided an opportunity to really be curious,” said Elizabeth.

For Amelia, she loved learning about what others were working on, noting that it was helpful to see the variety when peers are at a similar stage in their careers. “When you're working on the Ph.D., it’s a very specific space of expertise, sometimes it feels like tunnel vision. The Rising Stars workshop is a little bit like going from the tunnel out into a beautiful meadow and you see,  ‘Oh, wow! There are so many things that we could do.’”

More information about recent Rising Stars workshops can be found here. The nomination date will open in January 2026.