Vani Mandava is the Head of Engineering for the UW Scientific Software Engineering Center within eScience Institute. In her role, she is responsible for setting up the SSEC organization and work with research investigators to define the priorities and scope of software infrastructure that will strengthen the scientific software community. The primary mission of the SSEC is to collaborate with researchers from UW and around the world to create visionary, innovative and resilient solutions for pressing research and societal challenges.

Prior to joining UW in September 2022, Vani spent over two decades at Microsoft, most recently as Director of Data Science with Microsoft Research Outreach managing a portfolio of AI, cloud and data science investments in academia. Her career spanned engineering and product roles in client, server and services products across Microsoft Office, Bing AdCenter, Microsoft Academic and academic outreach for Cloud and Trustworthy AI. She led Microsoft’s response for the NSF/OSTP led National AI Research Resource initiative. She was engaged with MSR Faculty Summit for several years and has spoken at/ served in several computing conferences including ACM SIGKDD, SIGSPATIAL, AAAI, Supercomputing, IEEE Big Data, IC2E, ICDM, Grace Hopper, among others.

She serves on the Datathon committee for the global Women in Data Science conference, and on the Technical Advisory Committee for the International Computer Science Institute at UC Berkeley. She is passionate about fostering belonging and inclusivity in tech. She has served as a community volunteer, startup mentor, and board member for regional and national non-profit organizations. She enjoys writing and quilting as creative outlets away from her tech roles.