Karen Tsai
Staff Scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory
Los Alamos, New Mexico, United States
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolKaren Tsai is a Staff Scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory with eight years of research-driven software engineering experience, blending computational science rigor with practical systems work. She holds an MS in Computational Science, Engineering and Mathematics from UT Austin and dual BS/BA degrees in Computer Science and Economics, reflecting a rare mix of technical depth and quantitative thinking. Proficient in Matlab, Python, Java and C/C++, she contributes to scientific software ecosystems—most notably enhancing Spack package definitions for high-performance packages like flecsi and legion, improving dependency management and configuration for HPC builds. Comfortable in interdisciplinary teams, Karen focuses on maintainable, reproducible research software and has a track record of bridging research prototypes to production-ready tooling in national-lab environments.
8 years of coding experience
3 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Science - MS, Computational Science, Engineering and Mathematics, Master of Science - MS, Computational Science, Engineering and Mathematics at The University of Texas at Austin
English, Chinese, Japanese
Github Skills (6)
build-tools10
python10
package-management10
scientific-computing9
cmake9
hpc9
Programming languages (4)
Github contributions (5)
spack/spack
May 2019 - Nov 2021
A flexible package manager that supports multiple versions, configurations, platforms, and compilers.
Role in this project:
Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:4 reviews, 13 commits, 16 PRs in 2 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Karen primarily contributed to the `flecsi` and `legion` packages within the `spack/spack` repository, a package manager for scientific software. Their work involved modifying package definitions (`package.py` files) to add dependencies, update versions, and enable/disable specific features like static analysis and HDF5 support. These changes demonstrate a focus on maintaining and extending the capabilities of existing software packages within the Spack ecosystem. Additionally, the user updated configuration settings for Gasnet.
compilerspythonradiussplatformslinux
ktsai7/spack
May 2019 - Mar 2023
A flexible package manager that supports multiple versions, configurations, platforms, and compilers.
Contributions:64 pushes, 20 branches in 3 years 10 months
compilersplatformspackage-managerconfigurationsmultiple-versions
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