Faculty Profiles

Colleges and Departments

Dr. Tanzima Islam

  • Associate Professor - Computer Science
  • Program Faculty - Computer Science
Portrait of Dr. Tanzima Islam

Biography and education

Dr. Tanzima Islam is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Texas State University (TXST), with a dual appointment as an Associate Computational Scientist in the AI Department at Brookhaven National Laboratory. Dr. Islam earned her Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from Purdue University and was a postdoctoral scholar at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). Her research advances AI/ML methods that enable supercomputers to autonomously optimize their own performance, democratizing access to efficient scientific computing. Supported by the NSF, DOE, AMD, and multiple national laboratories, her work has been recognized with the NSF CAREER Award, DOE Early Career Award, R&D 100 Award, LLNL's Science & Technology Award, and TXST’s Presidential Seminar Award. As a DOE SRP Fellow, Dr. Islam has built partnerships with national laboratories, including Sandia, Brookhaven, LLNL, LBNL, and ORNL, while creating research opportunities for graduate and undergraduate students. Her outreach also extends internationally. In Bangladesh, she co-created the country’s first research and mentoring platform for women in computing. Through this work, she has mentored hundreds of female computer science students pursuing graduate school, competitive fellowships, and STEM careers.

Teaching Interests

  • Islam, Tanzima Z (Principal). OPTIX: A Multi-Modal Foundation Model for Performance-Aware HPC Code Intelligence, Department of Energy, Federal, $750000. (Funded: September 1, 2026 - May 31, 2027). Grant.
  • Islam, Tanzima Z (Principal). NSF CAREER Award, National Science Foundation, Federal, $650000. (Submitted: July 24, 2024, Funded: January 1, 2025 - September 30, 2030). Grant.
  • Islam, Tanzima Z (Other), Yeom, Jae-Seung (Principal). ICE4HPC: Towards the Intelligent Center for HPC, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, $100000. (Submitted: July 2022, Funded: October 1, 2022 - September 30, 2023). Grant.
  • Islam, Tanzima Z (Co-Principal), Pouchard, Line (Principal), Nicolae, Bogdan (Co-Principal). Scalable Metadata And Provenance Services for Reproducible Hybrid Workflows, Department of Energy, Federal, $2430000. (Submitted: July 2022, Funded: September 15, 2022 - September 14, 2025). Grant.
  • Islam, Tanzima Z (Principal). DoE Early Career Research Program, Department of Energy, Federal, $760819. (Submitted: January 20, 2022, Funded: September 1, 2022 - August 31, 2027). Grant.
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  • Zaeed, M., Islam, T. Z., & Indic, V. (2026). <scp>Optimas</scp>                     : An Intelligent Analytics-Informed Generative AI Framework for Performance Optimization. In Proceedings of the 32nd ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining V.2 (pp. 6373–6384). ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/3770855.3818188
  • Islam, T. Z., Schutte, H., Zaeed, M., & Marathe, A. (2026). Data-Driven Analysis to Understand GPU Hardware Resource Usage of Optimizations. The International Journal of High Performance Computing Applications, 40(3), 404–420. https://doi.org/10.1177/10943420251404998
  • Banday, B., Thopalli, K., Islam, T. Z., & Thiagarajan, J. J. (2025). On The Role of Prompt Construction In Enhancing Efficacy and Efficiency of LLM-Based Tabular Data Generation. In ICASSP 2025 - 2025 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP) (pp. 1–5). IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/icassp49660.2025.10888077
  • Patki, T., Thiagarajan, J. J., Ayala, A., & Islam, T. Z. (2019). Performance optimality or reproducibility: that is the question (pp. 1--30). ACM/IEEE.
  • Islam, T. Z., Ayala, A., Jensen, Q., & Ibrahim, K. (2019). Toward a Programmable Analysis and Visualization Framework for Interactive Performance Analytics. In International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC) (pp. 70--77). IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/ProTools49597.2019.00015
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  • Award / Honor Recipient: Research Millionaire FY2022-2024, College of Science and Engineering at Texas State University. October 14, 2024
  • Award / Honor Recipient: Presidential Seminar Award, Texas State University. November 5, 2023
  • Award / Honor Recipient: R&D 100, R&D 100 Magazine. November 2019
  • Award / Honor Recipient: Best Poster Award, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Annual Scholars Poster Symposium. 2016
  • Award / Honor Recipient: LLNL Director’s Science & Technology Award for Excellence in Publication, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. October 2014
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  1. Board of Directors

    Bangladeshi Women in Computer Science and Engineering

  2. Reviewer / Referee

    DOE SciDAC Proposal Reviewer Panel

  3. Coordinator / Organizer

    International Workshop on Big Data Computation, Analysis & Applications (BDCAA)

  4. Attendee / Participant

    NSF OAC Proposal Review Panel

  5. Attendee / Participant

    NSF SHF Proposal Review Panel

  6. Editor

    Journal of Parallel Computing

  7. View all activities