HANAMI High-Level Symposium | 3rd Edition

Mohamed Wahib
RIKEN Center for Computational Science (R-CCS)

Mohamed Wahib is a team principal (PI) of the “High Performance Artificial Intelligence Systems Research Team” at RIKEN Center for Computational Science (R-CCS), Kobe, Japan. Prior to that he worked as a senior scientist at AIST/TokyoTech Open Innovation Laboratory, Tokyo, Japan. His research interests revolve around the central topic of high-performance programming systems, in the context of HPC and AI. He is actively working on several projects including AI-based science, as well as high-level frameworks for programming traditional scientific applications.

Talk: ML Surrogates in Scientific Applications

Niclas Schroeter
German Climate Computing Centre (DKRZ)

Niclas Schroeter is a Research Software Engineer at the German Climate Computing Centre (DKRZ). His current work is focused mainly on the creation and maintenance of climate-specific benchmarks across multiple European projects, alongside the evaluation of novel architectures for climate and weather codes. Other research interests include storage-related topics and the improvement of scientific post-processing workflows.

Talk: HPCW: Making The Case for Domain-Specific Benchmarks

Pascale Braconnot
CEA

Pascale Braconnot is a CEA research director at Laboratoire de Sciences du Climat et de l’Environnement and Institut Pierre Simon Laplace in France. She is a specialist in climate modelling. Her research activities concern the physics of climate, air-sea coupling, climate change experiments, and ocean and vegetation feedbacks at different time scales, including paleoclimate. She is in charge of the French climate modelling infrastructure CLIMERI-France and is the current chair of the European modelling infrastructure ENES-RI executive board. She is leading the ENES-RISe European infrastructure project on services concerning climate HPC, data management and model evaluation. She contributed to or led several international working groups of the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) and Future Earth, including the WCRP joint scientific committee. She has been involved as a lead author or review editor in the last three Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment reports.

Talk: Climate change uncertainties resulting from climate complexity and multiple time scales

Shin-ichiro Shima
University of Hyogo

Dr. Shin-ichiro Shima has been at the University of Hyogo since 2011 and became a professor in 2024. After completing his Ph.D. in nonlinear dynamics at Kyoto University in 2005, he became a research scientist at the Earth Simulator Center, Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology. With an eye on the future of supercomputers, he developed novel numerical algorithms for multiscale-multiphysics phenomena at this supercomputer center and constructed the super-droplet method (SDM), a Lagrangian particle-based algorithm for cloud microphysics. Since then, he has been working on this topic to explore the potential of the particle-based cloud modeling method.

Talk: Multiscale Cloud Microphysics Modeling from Aerosols to Convection with the Super-Droplet Method

Claudia Filippi
University of Twente

Claudia Filippi is a Professor in Computational Chemical Physics at the University of Twente, the Netherlands. She received her PhD from Cornell University in 1996. After a postdoc at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, she held academic positions at University College Cork and Leiden University before joining the University of Twente in 2009. She has made significant contributions to the development of quantum Monte Carlo methods, connecting accurate electronic-structure theory with multiscale modelling and applications to molecular and materials systems. She coordinated the European TREX Center of Excellence in Exascale Computing, leading the development of efficient, scalable software solutions for stochastic quantum chemistry.

Talk: Quantum Monte Carlo forces: from reference data to machine-learned models

Clément Richefort
Jülich Supercomputing Centre

Clément Richefort is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC), where he specialises in bridging theoretical numerical linear algebra with HPC. He holds a PhD from the Université de Bordeaux, and his expertise spans sparse multigrid methods, iterative solvers, and GPU programming, developed through research collaborations with CEA and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Currently, he works within the EU-Japan HANAMI collaboration, optimising the multi-GPU ChASE iterative eigensolver on the JUPITER exascale system for materials science applications. His latest research focuses on integrating the Ozaki Scheme II into ChASE to enable high-accuracy FP-GEMM operations utilising INT8 Tensor Cores.

Talk: Emulating flexible precision with Ozaki-II in iterative methods: the case of the ChASE library

Deborah Prezzi
CNR-NANO in Modena

Deborah Prezzi is a senior researcher at CNR-NANO in Modena, Italy. Her research focuses on the theoretical and computational modelling of materials, with particular emphasis on the connection between atomistic structure, electronic properties, spectroscopy, and functional behaviour. Over the years, she has worked on a broad range of low-dimensional and nanoscale systems, including carbon-based nanostructures, two-dimensional materials, and optoelectronic materials, often in close interplay with experimental spectroscopy. More recently, her interests have expanded to energy-storage materials, where automated atomistic simulations, data-generation workflows, and machine-learning approaches can provide new insights into complex electrochemical processes. In this direction, her work aims to combine physically grounded simulations with data-driven methods to interpret spectroscopic fingerprints and understand degradation, lithiation, and interfacial phenomena in battery materials.

Talk: Machine-learned spectroscopy for silicon batteries: from automated workflows to chemical insight

Katsuhisa Ozaki
Shibaura Institute of Technology

Katsuhisa Ozaki is a Professor in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at Shibaura Institute of Technology. He received his Ph.D. in Engineering from Waseda University in 2007. He was an Assistant Professor at Waseda University from April 2007 to March 2008, and a full-time Visiting Lecturer from April 2008 to March 2010. At Shibaura Institute of Technology, he served as an Assistant Professor from April 2010 to March 2013 and as an Associate Professor from April 2013 to March 2019, and has been a Professor since April 2019. His research interests include reliable computing, with a particular focus on rounding error analysis in finite-precision arithmetic. His main research area is numerical linear algebra, where he develops fast and accurate algorithms for reliable scientific computing.

Talk: Accuracy-Tunable Matrix Computation Using Low-Precision Arithmetic: Ozaki Schemes and Applications

Yoshitaka Tateyama
Institute of Science Tokyo (Science Tokyo)

Yoshitaka Tateyama received his MSc and PhD in physics from The University of Tokyo. He has then worked at National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS) in Tsukuba since 2001. He finally got promoted to the Director of Research Center for Energy and Environmental Materials (GREEN). During his NIMS term, he has worked in the Department of Chemistry, University of Cambridge as a visiting researcher for 2003-2004, and got awarded JST PRESTO researchers twice for 2007-2015. He also received Gottfried Wagener Prize in 2015. In 2023, he moved to Tokyo Institute of Technology as a full professor, and is now a Professor in Laboratory for Chemistry and Life Science (CLS), Institute of Science Tokyo (Science Tokyo). He has researched electrochemical, ionics, and interfacial phenomena, especially in battery, at the DFT and MD levels, He was the leader of Materials-Science based projects under “Program for Promoting Researches on the Supercomputer Fugaku” by MEXT, Japan for 2020-2026.

Talk: HPC with DFT revealed microscopic electrochemical and ionics phenomena in batteries

Marco Ruscone
Osaka University

Marco Ruscone is a JSPS postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Professor Mariko Okada at the Institute for Protein Research, Osaka University. Before moving to Osaka, he was a postdoctoral researcher in the Life Sciences Department, coordinated by Professor Alfonso Valencia, at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC). He began his academic career in Turin, Italy, earning a bachelor’s degree in Physics and a master’s degree in Physics of Complex Systems for Biology from the Università degli Studi di Torino. He completed his PhD in Computational Biology at Institut Curie in Paris, under the mentorship of Dr. Laurence Calzone, Dr. Andrei Zinovyev, and Dr. Vincent Noël. His current research focuses on building hybrid Boolean/ODE models to investigate cancer signaling, with a particular interest in therapeutic resistance and cancer hallmarks. More broadly, his work centers on developing multiscale computational models for cancer by combining dynamical systems approaches, Boolean network modeling, stochastic simulations, and AI-assisted automation.

Talk: Multiscale Modeling of Biological Systems: Integrating Metabolism, ECM Dynamics, and AI-Driven Workflows within the PhysiCell Framework

Mariko Okada
Osaka University

Mariko Okada is a Professor at the Institute for Protein Research, The University of Osaka, Japan, where she has been conducting research in cancer systems biology since 2016. She also served as Provost’s Visiting Professor of Systems Biology at Imperial College London, UK (2024–2025). Prior to joining The University of Osaka, she was a scientist and team leader at the RIKEN Institute (2000–2016), where she worked at the Genomic Sciences Center (GSC), the Research Center for Allergy and Immunology (RCAI), and the Center for Integrative Medical Sciences (IMS). Her research focuses on understanding how cancer signaling networks regulate cell fate decisions by integrating mathematical modeling, multi-omics analysis, and experimental approaches. Her group also develops computational methods for systems biology and has recently been exploring the application of natural language processing (NLP) and deep learning (DL) to mathematical modeling, enabling the development of disease-specific virtual patient models.

Talk: Bridging AI and Systems Biology to Build Virtual Patients for Precision Medicine

Rio Yokota
Supercomputing Research Center, Institute of Integrated Research, Institute of Science Tokyo

Rio Yokota is a Professor at the Supercomputing Research Center, Institute of Integrated Research, Institute of Science Tokyo. He also leads the AI for Science Foundation Model Research Team at RIKEN Center for Computational Science. His research interests lie at the intersection of high performance computing, machine learning, and linear algebra. He has been optimizing algorithms on GPUs since 2007, and was part of a team that received the Gordon Bell prize in 2009 using the first GPU supercomputer. More recently, he has been leading distributed training efforts on Japanese supercomputers such as ABCI, TSUBAME, and Fugaku. He is the co-developer of the Japanese LLM Swallow, and LLM-jp. He is also involved in the organization of multinational collaborations such as ADAC and TPC.

Talk: Open LLMs as Scientific Infrastructure: Lessons from Swallow and Opportunities for EU-Japan Collaboration

Yuji Sugita
RIKEN Center for Computational Science (R-CCS)

Yuji Sugita has investigated computational biophysics, mainly using molecular dynamics simulations to understand the structure-dynamics-function relationship in proteins, nucleic acids, and other biomacromolecules in cells. He developed replica-exchange molecular dynamics (REMD) and other enhanced conformational sampling methods for biomolecular conformational dynamics, which have been widely used in computational biophysics. He also simulated the bacterial cytoplasm using atomistic models on the K computer after developing high-performance molecular dynamics software, GENESIS.

Yuji Sugita is serving as a team principal and a deputy director at RIKEN Center for Computational Science (R-CCS), as well as a chief scientist at RIKEN Pioneering Research Institute (PRI). He also works as a professor at the Department of Physics, Faculty of Science & Graduate School of Science, the University of Tokyo since October 2025. He is a research supervisor of the JST ACT-X program, Life and Information, since 2024 to the present, to promote early-career researchers in this field.

Talk: Simulating large-scale biomolecular systems using multi-scale molecular dynamics

Umair Sadiq
KTH Royal Institute of Technology

Postdoctoral Researcher in the GROMACS team at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden. His current work focuses on developing a scalable Fast Multipole Method (FMM) library to accelerate Long-Range electrostatics calculations in GROMACS. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from PUCIT, Punjab University, Lahore, Pakistan; specializing in high-performance and GPGPU computing using CUDA, MPI, and OpenMP.

Talk: Scalable Long-Range Force Calculations in GROMACS Using Fast Multipole Method