Amanda Baran

Growing up in a traditional suburb, I didn't have a clear picture of what a career in technology looked like. It wasn't until I started my undergraduate studies at Lehigh that I realized how much I enjoyed solving the "hidden" problems of the backend. This curiosity eventually led me to the Scalable Systems and Software Research Group, where I am now a Ph.D. candidate. My dissertation, "Reimagining Programming Primitives for RDMA," is really about trying to make high-performance hardware more practical and easier for developers to use.

Along the way, I’ve been fortunate to learn from some incredible teams at NVIDIA, Google, and Salesforce. These experiences — from working on LLM inference to telemetry pipelines — have shaped how I think about building software at scale.

Because I didn't always see a clear path for myself in STEM, I feel a strong responsibility to help others find theirs. I spent several years helping to grow the Women in Computer Science community at Lehigh, and I’m currently honored to serve as the Graduate Student Senate President, where I get to support my fellow students in navigating their own academic journeys.