![]() ![]() Before applying for graduate school, Agarwal joined GM’s advanced engineering staff and put her skills toward helping the company figure out how to quickly and effectively integrate robotics into their automotive assembly line. It was very cool,” she said.Īfter completing the program, she methodically went through the disciplines presented that week and decided to pursue her undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering at Purdue University. The afternoons were dedicated to exposing us to a particular engineering field: industrial engineering one day, civil engineering the next, electrical, and so on we’d meet the professors, learn about their research, then visit their Labs. “The University had a big mainframe computer, and we spent the mornings learning to program and playing games on the system. That summer, Agarwal was one of 30 students participating in the program. But that changed when she was invited to a week-long summer program at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute designed to introduce high school students to different engineering disciplines. Instead, she found her place in these domains by sticking to her three guiding questions.Īlthough Agarwal came from an engineering family-her father was an electrical engineer at General Motors (GM) Research Laboratories and patented numerous inventions all her sisters became successful engineers-she didn’t always aspire to be an engineer. When Agarwal was growing up, many of the engineering fields she would eventually work in (robotics, networking, data science) didn’t exist or were in their infancy, so she never strove for careers in them. I’ve enjoyed immersing myself in team science, and I’m proud of having been able to help revitalize some of that ethos throughout my career at Berkeley Lab,” said Agarwal. “Looking back, I’ve really loved the opportunity to live the ethos of Ernest Lawrence’s original plan: big teams working on big problems. A celebration of her Lab career was held on July 7 in Berkeley. Now more than three decades since she first arrived as an intern, Agarwal will retire as Director of Berkeley Lab’s Scientific Data Division on July 1. ![]() The answer to these questions was a resounding “yes” in 1992 when Agarwal accepted an internship to work with Van Jacobson in Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s (Berkeley Lab’s) Networking Research Group and again in 1994 when she turned down academic job offers to work with William (Bill) Johnston in the Lab’s Information and Computing Sciences Division. Throughout her life, she had three guiding principles for determining whether she’d accept or stay at a job: Is the work fun? Is the research topic interesting? Will I be working with people I like? JDeborah Agarwal has always taken a pragmatic approach to her career. Since 1987 - Covering the Fastest Computers in the World and the People Who Run Them ![]()
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