We’re excited to announce that Ivona Brandić has been nominated as the 500th Science Ambassador! Our newly appointed Minister for Women, Science, and Research, Eva-Maria Holzeitner, congratulated her.

The Science Ambassadors initiative brings researchers into classrooms, allowing students to explore current research topics and experience science firsthand. The ambassadors lead interactive workshops, discuss their research and careers, and answer questions about science. They demonstrate how everyday phenomena and classroom concepts are reflected in research, showing students how science comes to life. The Ambassadors promote an understanding of scientific methods and encourage critical thinking with the aim of strengthening trust in science and democracy. The Science Ambassadors initiative is led and implemented by Austria’s Agency for Education and Internationalization (OeAD).

The school visits are a unique opportunity for researchers to talk to children and young people, says Ivona Brandić: “I am really looking forward to sharing my enthusiasm for my field of research with the students. The questions from the children and young people will be a highlight – they often think ‘out of the box’ – that will certainly be exciting for me!” Ivona Brandić is Professor of High-Performance Computing Systems at the Research Unit Data Science at TU Wien Informatics. In 2015, she was awarded the FWF START Prize, the highest Austrian award for early-career researchers. She has been a member of the Young Academy of the Austrian Academy of Sciences since 2016, and in 2011, she received the Distinguished Young Scientist Award from TU Wien for her project on Holistic Energy-Efficient Hybrid Clouds. Her interests include virtualized HPC systems, energy-efficient ultra-scale distributed systems, massive-scale data analytics, hybrid classic/quantum systems, and software engineering methods for sustainability. Her research focuses on sustainable IT, with particular emphasis on energy-efficient and resource-saving computing systems. With her expertise in this field, Ivona Brandić will lead school workshops on the topic of Sustainable AI.

Read more about Ivona’s meeting with minister Eva-Maria Holzleitner (German only).

Curious about Ivona Brandić?

Find out more about her research and work in our #5QW interview series.

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