Mariam Kiran Wins Rising Star Award for Network Engineering

Mariam Kiran, a research scientist in the Scientific Networking Division (ESnet) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), has been named a Networking-Networking Women (N2Women) Rising Star in Networking and Communications for 2021.

N2Women is a discipline-specific community of researchers in the fields of networking and communications designed to encourage diversity and foster connections among under-represented women in this computing sub-field. N2Woman is supported by IEEE’s Communications Society as well as the National Science Foundation and industry partners such as Google and Facebook.

Kiran was one of only 10 women from around the world honored for this year’s award, which was announced June 23 on International Women in Engineering Day. Kiran was recognized for her growing contributions to applying advanced software and machine learning techniques to enhance high-speed networks and distributed computing challenges.

“This is an honor, and I am very grateful to be recognized by my peers and mentors for my research work of developing new machine learning techniques to address network engineering challenges,” Kiran said. “Receiving a N2Women Rising Star is also extra special in being recognized as an early career scientist, and also adds confidence to continue making progress in male-dominated fields such as networking.”

Kiran joined Berkeley Lab in 2016 and received a DOE ASCR Early Career Award in 2017. Her current work involves exploring deep reinforcement learning, unsupervised clustering, and classification techniques to optimally control distributed network resources, improve high-speed big data transfers for exascale science applications, and optimize how current network infrastructure is utilized. She has also been a Royal Society’s Scientist for Westminster (UK Parliament), received the Fretwell-Downing Prize at Sheffield, and was a part of an ESnet submission that was a finalist for a 2020 R&D100 award.

In addition to Kiran, the N2Women Rising Stars for 2021 include:

        • Maria Apostolaki, ETH, Switzerland

        • Yanmin Gong, University Of Texas

        • Israat Haque, Dalhousie University, Canada

        • Wei Li, Georgia State University

        • Andra Lutu, Telefonica, Spain

        • Rachee Singh, Microsoft

        • Elahe Soltanaghaei, Carnegie Mellon University

        • Mina Tahmasbi Arashloo, Cornell University

        • Yiting Xia, Max Planck Institute, Germany