San Diego, CA — March 9, 2026 – HPCwire, the leading publication for news and information for the high performance computing industry, today unveiled its People to Watch for 2026. This feature highlights key community members who are driving the industry forward, people you should be keeping an eye on in the year to come.
Over the course of the program, HPCwire has recognized more than 275 HPC luminaries who have gone on to achieve extraordinary things. One dozen additional individuals are being honored in 2026, the 24th year of the People to Watch program.
“Selecting 12 People to Watch is profoundly difficult, considering the immense amount of intelligence, creativity, and drive that exists in the HPC community,” said HPCwire Managing Editor Alex Woodie. “There are many individuals worthy of this honor, but I feel confident that the 2026 People to Watch exemplify the relentless pursuit of excellence and progress that this program represents.”
This year’s group of People to Watch is marked by the transformative impact that AI is having on the fields of science and engineering. Despite the enormous potential for automation that AI brings to many fields, including scientific computing, none of it works without people — people like the ones we are proud to honor. Our 12 People to Watch for 2026 are at the forefront of these trends, adapting new technology to our rapidly-changing world in order to unlock the answers to the biggest societal challenges of our time and make the impossible, possible.
The 2026 HPCwire People to Watch selections are:
Rosa Badia
HPC Software Research Area Director, Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC)
Ian Colle
Senior Vice President and Chief Product Officer, Penguin Solutions
Eric Demers
SVP, GPU IP Engineering, Intel Data Center Group
Jay Gambetta
Director of IBM Research and IBM Fellow
Dario Gil
Under Secretary for Science, U.S. Department of Energy
Bastian Koller
Managing Director High Performance Computing Center Stuttgart (HLRS)
Elizabeth L’Heureux
Principal Head of HPC, BP
Emmanuel Le Roux
Senior Vice President, Head of Bull at Atos Group
Thomas Lippert
Director, Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC)
Satoshi Matsuoka
Director, RIKEN Center for Computational Science
Samantika Sury
Fellow, Chief Hardware Architect and VP, HPC and AI Solutions, HPE
Kathy Yelick
Robert S. Pepper Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences and Vice Chancellor for Research, UC Berkeley
To read exclusive interviews with each Person to Watch, please visit:
www.hpcwire.com/people-to-watch-2026
About HPCwire
HPCwire is a news site and weekly newsletter covering the fastest computers in the world and the people who run them. As the trusted source for HPC news since 1987, HPCwire serves as the publication of record on the issues, opportunities, challenges, and community developments relevant to the global High Performance Computing space. Its reporting covers the vendors, technologies, users, and the uses of high performance, AI- and data-intensive computing within academia, government, science, and industry. Subscribe now at www.hpcwire.com.
About TCI Media
TCI Media (formerly Tabor Communications Inc.) is the home of the Wire publications: AIwire, HPCwire, BigDATAwire, and QCwire, which broadly cover Advanced Scale technologies for scientific and technical computing. The Wire publications closely follow the convergence of AI, HPC, and Big Data, and the evolution of Quantum Computing. Together, they unify the IT communities that we serve, providing news, analysis, and information to educate and engage users and decision-makers seeking high performance and advanced scale computing solutions for scientific and technical workloads across AI, HPC, Big Data, and Quantum Computing. More information can be found at www.tci-media.com.
