While moving from France to Georgia for a year turnaround is no small feat, especially for a family with two young daughters, this was an opportunity that was several years in the making for Benoit.

Benoit will be working at Georgia Tech until Summer 2018, with much of her time spent researching alongside CSE Professor and Associate Chair Ümit Catalyürek. The two first worked together more than ten years ago while collaborating for a survey paper on workflow scheduling and have been trying to find an opportunity to work together again ever since.

“Both our teams had been working on pipelined workflows for some time. We discussed our research at the IPDPS conference and decided we should collaborate. I also went to visit Ümit at Ohio State University to initiate collaborations. It took several years to come up with the survey paper,” said Benoit.

Benoit decided to come to Georgia Tech to initially strengthen collaborations with a year-long visit to research alongside Catalyürek after becoming involved with some of the scheduling problems his research group is currently working on. However, the timely opportunity to teach the CSE algorithms class – Benoit’s area of expertise – presented itself after her initial decision to research at the school of CSE. She was asked if she would be willing to teach it, of which, Benoit agreed to.

Before joining Georgia Tech, Benoit was serving as an associate professor, teaching in the  Computer Science Department at ENS Lyon, and doing her research in the Computer Science Laboratory, LIP.

Benoit is active in conference organization and has performed various roles over the years, most recently serving as the papers co-chair for Supercomputing Conference SC’2017, and as the program chair for IPDPS’2018. Apart from conference organization, Benoit is a principal investigator of the Keystone Inria Associate Team with Vanderbilt University on Scheduling Algorithms for Sparse Linear Algebra at Extreme Scale.

When she is not researching algorithm design and scheduling techniques for parallel and distributed platforms, she can be found outdoors – whether in the form of skiing, camping, or hiking – is dependent on the weather. Benoit is also an avid French horn enthusiast and has been playing the instrument for 25 years. Despite moving across the ocean, she has found another community to play with while working in Atlanta by joining the Atlanta Community Symphony Orchestra.