KAUST alumna Dr. Rabab Alomairy advances high-performance computing and AI research as a postdoctoral fellow at MIT.

Biography

KAUST alumna Dr. Rabab Alomairy earned both her M.S. and Ph.D. in computer science from the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) under the supervision of Professor David E. Keyes and Senior Research Scientist Hatem Ltaief. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow at MIT’s JuliaLab and a recipient of the KAUST Ibn Rushd Fellowship.

Her research spans high-performance computing (HPC), task-based numerical libraries, GPU programming and AI-accelerated scientific applications, with emphasis on performance optimization for multicore and many-core architectures. Dr. Alomairy has collaborated with leading institutions, including Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the Innovative Computing Laboratory at the University of Tennessee and MINES ParisTech, contributing to the DOE-funded SLATE project during her internship at UTK.

In recognition of her impactful work, Dr. Alomairy was named a Rising Star in Computational and Data Sciences by the U.S. Department of Energy in 2022. She also led the first Julia tutorial for productive HPC at the Supercomputing Conference. Her work has scaled across the world’s top supercomputers and earned international honors, including a finalist recognition for the ACM Gordon Bell Prize (2020), the Gauss Award and the IEEE Computer Society Technical Community on High Performance Computing (TCHPC) Early Career Researchers Award for Excellence in High Performance Computing (2025).

Dr. Alomairy continues to advance sustainable computation and foster collaboration across disciplines, translating advances in HPC and AI into real-world impact.

Research Interests

  • Task-based numerical libraries and applications
  • Performance optimizations
  • Artificial intelligence at large scale
  • Dense linear algebra

Awards and Distinctions

Education

Bachelor of Science (B.S.)
Computer Science, King Abdulaziz University , Saudi Arabia, 2010
Master of Science (M.S.)
Computer Science, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology , Saudi Arabia, 2013
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)
Computer Science, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology , Saudi Arabia, 2022

Related Media

Watch KAUST Class of 2022: Rabab on YouTube.

Questions and Answers

Why did you choose high-performance computing?

I chose the field of high-performance computing because it underpins progress across many disciplines. Grand challenges in areas such as biology, astronomy, climate modeling, and seismic inversion rely on large-scale computing. That connection between computational power and scientific discovery inspired me to specialize in HPC.