Michela Taufer, an ACM Distinguished Scientist, holds the Dongarra Professorship in High-Performance Computing at the University of Tennessee Knoxville. She completed her PhD in Computer Science from ETH Zurich. Taufer was a postdoctoral fellow at UC San Diego and The Scripps Research Institute, focusing on interdisciplinary projects in computational chemistry and computer systems. Her research spans high-performance computing, cloud computing, and volunteer computing, aiming to enhance AI for science. Taufer has held leadership roles at major HPC conferences and is the editor-in-chief of Future Generation Computer Systems. She is an advocate for diversity in academia and interdisciplinary research.