Tushar Athawale is a Computer Scientist in the Visualization Group (led by Dr. David Pugmire) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). He is a Joint Faculty Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (UTK). He earned his M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from the University of Florida in May 2014 and May 2015, respectively (advisor: Prof. Alireza Entezari). He specializes in uncertainty visualization for efficient and trustworthy scientific data discovery, with additional research interests in topological data analysis, large-scale visualization, and high-performance computing.
Dr. Athawale received the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Early Career Research Award (2025) from the DOE’s Office of Science (SC), Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR). He was honored as one of the nation’s 74 most elite early-career engineers selected across the U.S. industry, national laboratories, and academia by the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) to attend the Grainger Foundation Frontiers of Engineering 2026 Symposium. ORNL’s Computing and Computational Sciences Directorate (CCSD) and Computer and Mathematics Division (CSMD) recognized his outstanding research achievements with the Emerging Star in Research Award in 2025 and the Special Award in 2024, respectively.
He is an IEEE Senior Member. He currently serves as an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics journal and as a Program Chair for IEEE VIS 2026 conference, the premier and largest conference in the data visualization field.
Prior to joining ORNL, Dr. Athawale was a postdoctoral fellow at the Scientific Computing and Imaging (SCI) Institute at the University of Utah (advisor: Prof. Chris R. Johnson). He was previously a full-time employee at MathWorks, the developer of the MATLAB computing software, before joining SCI.
Personal webpage: http://tusharathawale.info/home/
Links
Publications
Jul, 2026
Conference Paper
Viskores: Integrating Parallel Scientific Visualization Research into Applications
News
October 24, 2022
5 MIN READ
Fiber Uncertainty Visualization for Bivariate Data With Parametric and Nonparametric Noise Models
October 24, 2022
4 MIN READ
Accelerated Probabilistic Marching Cubes by Deep Learning for Time-Varying Scalar Ensembles