Launched in 2016, the PRACE Ada Lovelace Award is annually awarded to a female scientist who makes an outstanding contribution to and impact on High Performance Computing (HPC), in Europe and the world, and serves as a role model for women who are at the start of their scientific careers. Professor Marija Vranic, researcher at the Group of Lasers and Plasmas/Institute for Plasmas and Nuclear Fusion (GoLP/IPFN) and Invited Professor at the IST Department of Physics (DF), is the winner of the 2022 edition.

The IPFN researcher couldn’t be more excited about this distinction. “It is an honour for me to be associated in this way with Ada Lovelace, who wrote the first algorithm for a machine in the 1800s”. The professor shares that receiving this award “has a special meaning” and explains why: “I was able to do my research partly thanks to PRACE-supported projects. Apparently, they are happy with my scientific results so far”.

“My work is intrinsically linked with supercomputers. I have been PI and co-PI of several scientific projects awarded computer time in PRACE calls”, she says. “I made contributions both in algorithm development and in research into what these algorithms were used for,” she adds.

Marija Vranic’s research is focused on the interaction of light with plasmas in extreme conditions — a research field that has significantly gained relevance recently, especially since the Extreme Light Infrastructure (ELI) will soon be coming online in Europe. The ELI facilities will be able to generate laser beams that are around 10 000 times more intense than today’s lasers.

The IPFN researcher highlights “this field has enormous potential, both for basic science and for applications in technologies”. “For example, laser-plasma interactions may allow us to build miniature particle accelerators much cheaper than conventional ones. Using extreme plasmas, we will be able to recreate some conditions that occur naturally only in space, near black holes or pulsars. With this possibility, we will be able to study the microphysics of these objects in the laboratory”.

“It is also possible to create sources of x-rays and gamma rays, with properties suitable for creating biological and medical images with very good contrast and with the possibility of having the complete information in three dimensions”, highlights the IPFN researcher. “This could become the technology of the next generation of medical diagnostics”, she adds.

During her PhD at Técnico, Marija Vranic pioneered the implementation of a so-called radiation cooling model in light-particle interaction algorithms. Also, she developed a particle merging algorithm that allows scientists to simulate the large number of quantum particle pairs that arise in extreme plasmas. Her contributions are crucial for modelling extreme plasmas and have since been implemented in a number of codes by the plasma physics community.

Later, as a junior researcher at ELI Beamlines in Prague, the researcher studied the possibilities for future experiments with the facility’s high-intensity lasers and made an important discovery: using specific laser settings, positron beams, which are inherently difficult to generate and to handle, can be created and accelerated in just one single laser-electron beam collision — without the need of having separate creation and acceleration stages.

The Técnico researcher has already won a number of scientific awards and grants, including the John Dawson PhD thesis prize and the 2017 IBM Scientific Award. In 2021, she was selected by the Lisbon Academy of Sciences to join the Young Scientists Seminar.

Marija Vranic’s active role in the fight for Gender Equality

This distinction was also based on the active role of the Técnico professor in improving the visibility of women in physics and HPC, for instance, by reducing the gender imbalance of invited speakers at scientific conferences and her contribution to the creation of the “Women in Physics Student Club”.

Professor Marija Vranic is part of the GenderBalance@Técnico, participates in “Women in Plasma Physics” meetings that aim to highlight some problems and propose solutions at a structural level in the field of gender group equality.

According to the IPFN researcher, “several different initiatives are needed to improve the gender gap in STEM fields. People often focus on discrimination, but perhaps the most important thing is to highlight the role models, so that female students consider pursuing a STEM career”, she says.

The Award will be presented at the EuroHPC Summit Week 2021 / PRACEdays22, where the Técnico professor will give a keynote speech titled “Extreme plasma on a supercomputer” and participate in the closing panel discussion on “Emerging applications, model and implementation”.