Lorena A. Barba

Lorena A. Barba is a Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the School of Engineering and Applied Science, George Washington University. She leads the Open Source Program Office (OSPO) funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Her research focuses on computational methods in fluid dynamics, GPU computing, and open science practices. She has pioneered work on fast multipole methods (FMM) and boundary element methods (BEM), with applications in biomolecular electrostatics and aerodynamics.

Education includes a PhD from the California Institute of Technology and a BSc from Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María. She is a member of NumFOCUS, editorial boards for journals like Journal of Open Source Software, and a CUDA Fellow (2012).

Her lab has developed open-source tools such as PyGBe, cuIBM, and exaFMM. Notable awards include the Doctor Honoris Causa from Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María (2023) and contributions to reproducibility in computational science.

Her students have advanced topics like fluid-structure interaction, vortex methods, and nanoscale electrostatics. Collaborations span institutions like MIT, Purdue, and Virginia Tech. She advocates for open educational resources and flipped classrooms, with projects like AeroPython and CFD Python.

Labs and teams include the Barba Group, known for interdisciplinary work at the intersection of computational science, engineering, and open-source software.