2017 BECA Winner Announced – Lydia Tapia
Tapia is also the recipient of the 2016 Denice Denton Emerging Leader ABIE Award from the Anita Borg Institute for her high-quality research and a significant positive impact on diversity, and a 2016 NSF CAREER award for her work on simulating molecular assembly. As a Ph.D. student, she was awarded a NIH Molecular Biophysics Training Grant Fellowship, a Sloan Research Fellowship, and a P.E.O. scholarship.
She is most proud of the achievements of her students. Their accomplishments, to date, include a Popejoy Award for top Ph.D. dissertation at the University of New Mexico, being a finalist in the CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award, and an honorable mention in the National Center for Women in Information Technology Aspirations Award for high-school students. When Tapia and her students are not toiling in the lab, you can often find them performing interactive robot demos at local schools, robotics competitions, and museums.