Valerie Elaine Taylor (born May 24, 1963) is an American computer scientist who is the director of the Mathematics and Computer Science Division of Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. Her research includes topics such as performance analysis, power analysis, and resiliency. She is known for her work on "Prophesy," described as "a database used to collect and analyze data to predict the performance on different applications on parallel systems."
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Early life and education
Valerie Elaine Taylor was born May 24, 1963, in Chicago, Illinois. Her father, Willie Taylor, was an electrical engineer at Sonicraft and would bring his children to work with him on Saturdays. Taylor credits her pursuit of a career in science to that early exposure to building circuit boards, reading schematics, and soldering boards. While in high school, she spent her Saturdays attending the Illinois Institute of Technology's Early Identification Program and spent summers in various STEM programs. Taylor received her bachelor's and master's degrees in electrical engineering from Purdue University in 1985 and 1986, respectively.
In 1991, Taylor received her PhD at the University of California, Berkeley in electrical engineering and computer science, under advisor David Messerschmitt. She holds a patent for her dissertation work on sparse matrices.