Ratna Saripalli Lands Her ‘Dream Job’ as EMSL’s Chief Data Officer

Ratna Saripalli is living the dream.

The Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory, or EMSL, recently hired her as its Chief Data Officer, responsible for its digital infrastructure vision and strategy, as well as leading high-performance computing and data platform teams. EMSL is a Department of Energy (DOE) user facility, which means scientists worldwide can access its instruments and capabilities through proposal calls. Among its capabilities is a seamless process of sample prep to processing to analysis, including high-powered computing to gather and probe data.

“I saw the job posting and thought this is my dream job,” she said.

It wasn’t a straight path that brought Saripalli to EMSL. In fact, it was more of a circle.

Her husband accepted a job at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) in 2000. She, too, joined the Lab a short while later and conducted data analysis on everything from fish in the Columbia River to biological organisms in support of DOE’s then-new Genomes to Life program, launched in 2002. The research studied the chemistry of organisms and their interactions with the environment, with computing as a critical component of the work.

She met a genomics scientist at EMSL, located on the PNNL campus, and asked to job shadow her. “I watched her splice genes and was immensely intrigued with genomics,” said Saripalli. The experience spurred her to pursue a second MS degree, this time at Stanford, in biomedical informatics—a field synonymous with vast amounts of data and the need for computing power.

Nearly two decades later, Saripalli would return to EMSL, but only after earning an MBA degree and a doctorate. 

Her path

After Stanford, Saripalli jumped into the industry at Microsoft. The experience complemented her years working at a government national laboratory and in academia and gave her a first-hand look at the application of research and product development.

She sought mentors at Microsoft, and her curiosity about computer science eventually led her back to learning. Again.

“My kids tease me,” she said. “I tell them I’m testing the academic system.”

Saripalli started the doctorate program at Colorado University, finding an ideal mentor—Dr. Chuck Anderson—who helped her focus on combining two research passions: data and life sciences.

Her doctoral research—artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML)—may seem outside the scope of life sciences, but they’re intimately intertwined.

“Data is an underlying currency everywhere,” she says. “And computing used to be limited to specific domains, but now it’s ubiquitous,” she added. “Applications in biology and human health, particularly at the genome level, are aided by AI and ML.” “AI/ML is a sixteen trillion-dollar opportunity for our generations, and their applications will be pervasive.”

Working at Microsoft, and later at GE Healthcare allowed Saripalli to see end games—from targeted healthcare to understanding and manipulating environmental systems. The things we can discover now with scientific instrumentation are like having a front-row seat to the inner workings of humans and the environment. But to capture the information and do something useful with it, computing must continue to evolve—and that’s where she sees a place for her leadership and that of her team.

Saripalli says scaling up and staying on the bleeding edge is vital in a field where things become obsolete before they're built. She anticipates seeing more computational power behind understanding protein functions and how they impact our health. And looking at the smallest of things often leads to more data and, hence, the need for high-performance computing.

“You have to build flexible systems,” she explained. Saripalli is working on a data strategy for EMSL’s user program. Her goal is to enable users to easily retrieve and apply data across different domains.

Paying it forward

In addition to her work at EMSL, Saripalli teaches data science at the University of Maryland Global Campus. Roughly 60 percent of the school’s students are military service members posted worldwide, and Saripalli teaches one class per semester.

“I love learning, and now I love teaching and seeing students like me build their careers,” she added.

She’s also a board member of Cultivating Literacy, which empowers families of early readers.