Tammy Kolda's collaboration with the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences began when she and Rachel Ward attended a workshop at UC Berkely’s Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing.
“I ended up talking to her and posing a problem to her, because I knew she had the right expertise for it,” said Kolda. “She and her student were able to solve it very quickly and easily and turn that into a paper.”
Now, years later, Kolda returned to the Oden Institute as a JT Oden Visiting Research Fellow, working with Core Faculty members Rachel Ward and Joe Kileel on new problems in the domain of low-rank tensor factorization. “During my time here, I met with a lot of different folks, both students and professors, and just chatting with them about anything,” she said. “I enjoyed this quite a bit.”
The Oden Institute is far from the only research hub that Kolda regularly visits. As a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Northwestern University, she flies to Illinois every year to teach a short course — this year’s course covering randomized algorithms. She is also visiting and collaborating with colleagues at Flatiron Institute in NYC, as well as spending time at the nearby Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at NYU.
After twenty-two years at Sandia National Laboratories, Kolda is now an independent mathematical consultant under the auspices of her company MathSci.ai based in California.
Her consulting work has different flavors, including strategic advice on machine learning research and development that is tailored to the customer’s specific data domain, in-depth technical consulting, development of specialized training courses on tensor decompositions, and evaluation of candidates for academic appointments.
With such a wide range of specialities and research institutes at her disposal, Kolda has built a robust network of colleagues across the country. Kolda’s on-the-go lifestyle has another benefit lost to many of us since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic: in-person connection.