Call for Nominations for BECA Award
Take the time to nominate a woman for the CRA-W Borg Early Career Award (BECA) before January 4th, 2016. Nominations should be women in their early career in computer science and engineering who deserve to be recognized for their significant research contributions and positive/significant impact on advancing women in the computing research community.
Deadline: February 15
Announcement of Winner: May 25
Sign up for more updates on Awards and Scholarships
Previous Award Winners
2015 - Natalie Enright Jerger
Natalie Enright Jerger
Natalie Enright Jerger is an Associate Professor in the Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Toronto. Prior to joining the University of Toronto in 2009, she received her MSEE and PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2004 and 2008, respectively. She received her Bachelor’s degree from Purdue University in 2002. Natalie¹s research interests span a range of topics in computer architecture including interconnection networks, memory systems, many-core architectures and approximate computing. She currently leads a vibrant and enthusiastic group of 9 graduate students and 1 post-doc. She routinely invites undergraduates to do summer research in her lab. Her research has been supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the Canadian Foundation for Innovation, Ontario Centres of Excellence, Intel, AMD, Qualcomm and Fujitsu.
Natalie¹s contributions to research have been recognized with several awards including the Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation Early Researcher Award (2012), the Ontario Professional Engineers Young Engineer Medal (2014) and an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship (2015). She served as the program co-chair of the 7th Network-on-Chip Symposium and as the program chair of the 20th International Symposium on High Performance Computer Architecture. She is currently an associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Computers, IEEE Computer Architecture Letters and ACM Transactions on Architecture and Code Optimizations. Natalie has served on numerous program committees and conference organizing committees.
Natalie is passionate about mentoring students and is deeply committed to increasing the participation of women in computer science and engineering. She is actively involved in outreach and mentorship both locally and in the computer architecture community. She regularly speaks with high school students to promote interest in engineering. She co-organizes wicarch, an informal networking group of women in computer architecture designed to provide mentoring to female graduate students pursuing research in the field. In 2012, she co-organized a CRA-W/CDC Discipline Specific Mentoring Workshop on Computer Architecture. She has also spoken at several mentoring workshops including CRA-W Grad Cohort.
2014 - Jaime Teevan
Jaime Teevan
Jaime Teevan is a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research, and an Affiliate Assistant Professor in the Information School at the University of Washington. Working at the intersection of human computer interaction, information retrieval, and social media, she studies and supports people’s information seeking activities. Jaime was named a Technology Review (TR35) 2009 Young Innovator for her research on personalized search. She is particularly interested in understanding social and temporal context. She co-authored the first book on collaborative Web search and was chair of the Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM) 2012 conference.
Jaime also edited a book on Personal Information Management (PIM), edited a special issue of Communications of the ACM on the topic, and organized workshops on PIM and query log analysis. She has published numerous technical papers, including several best papers, and received a Ph.D. and S.M. from MIT and a B.S. in Computer Science from Yale University.
Jaime is passionate about mentoring young researchers and encouraging women to pursue computer science careers. She works with a number of graduate students, a high percentage of whom are female, talks regularly on topics related to gender and family, and publishes a popular web series on academic writing. As a mother to four young children, Jaime is particularly interested in helping researchers integrate parenthood with their academic pursuits. For example, she has written several articles about conference travel with children, and worked with conference organizational committees to implement better support for attendees with families.
2013 - Yanlei Diao
Yanlei Diao
Yanlei Diao is an Associate Professor at the School of Computer Science, University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her research interests lie in intelligent, real-time data management and big data analytics. She received her PhD in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley in 2005, and joined UMass Amherst in the same year. Yanlei has worked on a broad set of topics, including low-latency big data analytics, data streams, uncertain data management, and XML query processing. She has produced substantial results in these areas, resulting in 41 refereed publications including 17 papers at the most prestigious database conferences and journals. She has also released software with over 1000 downloads. Her technical contributions have had a significant impact in industry, resulting in research awards from Cisco, Google, IBM, NEC labs, etc., and led to collaborations with leading medical institutes. Yanlei is currently an Associate Editor of PVLDB, and has served on the program committees of all major database conferences as well as the organizing committees of ACM SIGMOD, CIDR, and DMSN.
Yanlei’s research contributions have been recognized in a series of awards, including the NSF Career Award, the IBM Scalable Innovation Faculty Award, and as one of eleven finalists for the Microsoft Research New Faculty Fellowship. She was a Distinguished Faculty Lecturer at the University of Texas at Austin, and has given more than 35 invited talks. In addition, her PhD dissertation won the 2006 ACM-SIGMOD Dissertation Award Honorable Mention.
Yanlei is fully committed to broadening the participation of women in computer science. She is playing a leadership role in outreach in both her school and in her research community. At UMass, she is co-chairing the outreach committee of her school, with a goal to attract more high school girls and women to computing. In her research community, she twice chaired the New Research Symposium at SIGMOD, which provides career advice and mentoring to graduate students and junior researchers, including many women. Yanlei is also a frequent speaker at mentoring workshops, including the CRA-W Graduate Cohort workshop and the SIGMOD DBMe mentoring workshop. She has advised 11 graduate and 8 undergraduate student researchers, 7 of which are women, and served as academic advisor of 10-20 undergraduates each semester.
2012 - M. Bernardine Dias & Katie A. Siek
M. Bernardine Dias
M. Bernardine Dias is an Associate Research Professor at Carnegie Mellon University. She has worked with both the Pittsburgh and Doha campuses and her primary affiliation is with the Field Robotics Center at the Robotics Institute. Originally from Sri Lanka, Dr. Dias earned her B.A. from Hamilton College in Clinton, New York with a dual concentration in Physics and Computer Science and a minor in Women’s Studies (1998), followed by a M.S. (2000) and Ph.D. (2004) in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University. Her research interests span technology for underserved communities and autonomous human-robot team coordination.
Dr. Dias’ principal research objective is to create culturally appropriate computing technology accessible to underserved communities. To this end she founded and directs the TechBridgeWorld research group that innovates and field tests computing solutions that address the needs of underserved communities around the world. Over the last eight years she has traveled to many parts of the world, meeting with underserved communities, creating technology solutions to fit their needs, empowering future technologists in these communities, and inspiring many students to follow her lead. TechBridgeWorld’s innovations span a variety of tools ranging from a low-cost automated Braille Writing Tutor for blind children, to computing and mobile phone-based tools for enhancing English literacy education, and many more. Dias is also a recognized leader in autonomous team coordination research. Her doctoral dissertation developed the “TraderBots” market-based framework for multi-robot coordination in dynamic environments. She continues to advance the state-of-the-art in autonomous team coordination and planning through the rCommerce research group which she co-created and co-directs. Her research efforts also extend to Carnegie Mellon’s Qatar campus through the Qri8 robotics lab which she co-founded and co-directs.
Dr. Dias has authored many articles for leading academic journals and conferences, given numerous presentations at a variety of forums, and has received several honors and awards. She has also lead several research projects as principal investigator with funding from a variety of sponsors including the Qatar National Research Fund, the Boeing Company, Yahoo, and Google.
Dias is also passionate about mentoring students and works through many avenues to encourage young people, and especially girls and women, to pursue careers in technology. Encouraging women in computing is one of Dr. Dias’ passions. At Carnegie Mellon University, she is a founding member of Women@SCS, a campus organization dedicated to creating and supporting women’s professional and social opportunities in computing. She currently serves as faculty advisor to the graduate Women@SCS.
Katie A. Siek
Katie Siek is an assistant professor in Computer Science at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her primary research interests are in human computer interaction, health informatics, and ubiquitous computing. More specifically, her research examines how technology can enable people to proactively manage their own health. Professor Siek’s research has been disseminated in 27 peer-reviewed publications and 23 invited research talks. The best part of her job is collaborating with brilliant students – 5 Ph.D. students (2 women), 13 M.S. students (3 women), 10 B.S. students (9 women, 2 first-generation college students), and 1 female high school student.
Dr. Siek is on the ACM-W Council and is currently a co-editor for the ACM-W Newsletter. She collaboratively developed a workshop series to train students and staff members from other universities about starting K-12 outreach programs. In addition, she is on the college’s Diversity Action Committee and advises underrepresented and first-generation college students.
Dr. Siek’s research is supported by the National Institutes of Health, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and a National Science Foundation CAREER award. She earned her PhD and MS in computer science from Indiana University Bloomington and her BS in computer science from Eckerd College. She was a National Physical Science Consortium Fellow at Indiana University.
2011 - Alexandra Fedorova
Alexandra Fedorova
Alexandra (Sasha) Fedorova is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Simon Fraser University. She earned her Ph.D. at Harvard University in 2006 under Margo Seltzer. Sasha’s mostly known for her research on operating system scheduling for multicore processors — research which she started at Sun Microsystems Labs during her three-year internship. While at Sun Labs, she also co-developed the simulator for Sun’s Niagara processor and participated in research on Hybrid Transactional Memory. At SFU Sasha has co-founded the Systems, Networking and Architecture (SYNAR) research lab. Her present focus is on improving efficiency of multicore processors using software methods, be it OS algorithms, hypervisor policies or the language runtime. Sasha has more than 40 refereed publications, and gave more than 20 invited talks and appearances. She widely collaborates with industry, and her research is supported by (formerly) Sun Microsystems and now Oracle, Google, Research in Motion, ST Microelectronics, Intel, and Electronics Arts. Sasha enjoys working with her team of 11 graduate students and participating in outreach activities women and minorities. She was a speaker at 4 career and technical workshops for women and minorities, a mentor in the Canadian Distributed Mentor Project and a participant in two ScienceAlive camps that introduced middle-school kids to technology.
2010 - AJ Bernheim Brush & Radhika Nagpal
AJ Bernheim Brush
Dr. A.J. Bernheim Brush is a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research. Dr. Brush’s research area is Human-Computer Interaction with a focus on Ubiquitous Computing and Computer Supported Collaboration (CSCW). Dr. Brush is most well known for her research on technologies for families and her expertise conducting field studies of technology. Her current focus is home automation as co-leader of the Lab of Things project. She is a Senior Member of the ACM and was honored to receive a Borg Early Career Award in 2010. Her research has received 2 best paper awards and several best paper nominations. She has 11 patents and more than 18 inventions patent pending. Dr. Brush was co-general chair of UbiComp 2014, and serves on the UbiComp Steering Committee and is co-chair of CRA-W. Dr. Brush also serves regularly on Program Committees for many conferences including UbiComp, Pervasive, CHI, and CSCW. Dr. Brush graduated Summa cum Laude from Williams College and earned her Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Washington.
Radhika Nagpal
Radhika Nagpal is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Harvard University and a member of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. She received her PhD degree in Computer Science from MIT, and spent a year as a research fellow at Harvard Medical School. Currently, Radhika is a professor in Computer Science, in the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. She is also a core faculty member of the Harvard Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, where she co-leads the BioRobotics Platform. She is a recipient of the 2005 Microsoft New Faculty Fellowship award and the 2007 NSF Career award. Her research interests are in bio-inspired multi-agent systems, their application to robotics and networks, and understanding multi-cellular systems in biology.
2009 - Kim Hazelwood
Kim Hazelwood
Kim Hazelwood is a Director of Systems Research at Yahoo! Labs. Kim’s general research interests include computer architecture, performance analysis and tools, power-aware computing, memory-constrained devices, accelerators, and code optimization. Previously, she was a software engineer in the Platforms division of Google, where she focused on performance analysis of large datacenter apps and road-mapping of Google data centers. Prior to that, Kim was a tenured Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Virginia and a faculty consultant for Intel. While at UVA, she was also a one-day-per-week faculty consultant for Intel, where she helped co-develop the Pin dynamic instrumentation system, which has been downloaded over 60,000 times and cited in over 1000 publications. She has a PhD in Computer Science from Harvard University and has authored 40 publications and one book. Kim is a recipient of the MIT Top 35 Innovators under 35 award, the Anita Borg Early Career Award, and an NSF Career Award.
2008 - Chandra Krintz
Chandra Krintz
Chandra Krintz has been an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) since 2007. She joined the UCSB faculty in 2001 as an Assistant Professor after receiving her M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the University of California, San Diego. Chandra’s research area is programming language implementations, and her work focuses on automatic and adaptive compiler, virtual runtime, and operating system techniques that improve performance (for high-end systems) and increase battery life (for mobile, resource-constrained devices). Chandra’s research has been published in a number of ACM venues including ASPLOS, CGO, ECOOP, LCTES, OOPSLA, PACT, PLDI, TACO, TPDS, has been funded by grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Intel, and Microsoft, and has been recognized with an NSF CAREER award (in 2006). Chandra has also been recognized for teaching excellence with the senior-selected, 2008 co-award for outstanding Faculty Member in Computer Science. Moreover, Chandra has contributed significantly to the outreach, support, and encouragement of women in the field. In particular, Chandra has been instrumental in her department’s diversity-aware curriculum efforts, plays an active role as (elected) vice-chair of the Executive Committee of the ACM Special Interest Group on Programming Languages (SIGPLAN) to oversee the organization of the SIGPLAN conferences and to improve diversity and participation of women in the community, and has implemented multiple, novel, curricular directions that facilitate retention of female computer science undergraduates and that expose young girls to the opportunities and potential of computer science. Specifically, Chandra has implemented courses in which computer science and engineering students use their computer skills (of different levels) to help others in the community (e.g., non-profit organizations) with technology and to introduce other young people to the potential of computer science (e.g., local high school students). Since 2007, Chandra has partnered with Microsoft Research (MSR) and Girls Incorporated, a nationwide non-profit organization dedicated to inspiring young girls to be strong, smart, and bold. Chandra and her students teach Girls Inc. classes (for girls of ages 9-10) that introduce the girls to and engage them with the field of computer science, and that show them how fun computer programming can be — with the help of a computer game from MSR and only a game controller.
2007 - Li-Shiuan Peh
Li-Shiuan Peh
Li-Shiuan Peh is Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT, and has been on the faculty of MIT since 2009. Previously, she was on the faculty of Princeton University from 2002. She graduated with a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University in 2001, and a B.S. in Computer Science from the National University of Singapore in 1995. Her research focuses on low-power interconnection networks, on-chip networks and parallel computer architectures, and is funded by several grants from the National Science Foundation, the DARPA MARCO Gigascale Systems Research Center as well as Intel Corporation. She was awarded the Sloan Research Fellowship in 2006, and the NSF CAREER award in 2003. She has been involved in the organization and participation of several outreach activities as the faculty co-adviser of the Princeton Graduate Women in Science and Engineering (GWISE) since 2003, organizing activities both within and beyond Princeton such as an annual event for 100+ high school girls in New York City targeted at attracting women into Engineering since 2004, and a career workshop at Princeton for women undergraduates and graduates from universities in the tri-state area in 2006. She has also organized and participated at a NSF-funded CRA-W/CDC Computer Architecture Summer Workshop for minorities in computer architecture, and spoke at a distinguished women faculty lecture series at UT Austin.
2006 - Gail Murphy
Gail Murphy
Gail Murphy is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Associate Dean (Research & Graduate Studies) in the Faculty of Science at the University of British Columbia. I am also a co-founder and Chief Scientist at Tasktop Technologies Incorporated. My research interests are in software engineering with a particular interest in improving the productivity of knowledge workers, including software developers. My group develops tools to aid with the evolution of large software systems and performs empirical studies to better understand how developers work and how software is developed. My teaching spans from introductory computer science courses to undergraduate and graduate courses in software engineering. She received a B.Sc. (Honours) degree in Computing Science from the University of Alberta in 1987, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the University of Washington in 1994 and 1996, respectively. Between her undergraduate degree and attending graduate school, she worked as a senior software engineer at MPR Teltech, a telecommunications research and development company that was located in Burnaby B.C.Dr. Murphy has served on numerous program committees for the leading conferences in software engineering research, she was the general chair for the 2004 Aspect-oriented Software Development Conference, and she served two years as the Associate Head for Graduate Affairs in the Department of Computer Science. In 2005, she received the Dahl-Nygaard Junior Prize from AITO and in 2006, she was awarded a NSERC Steacie Fellowship.
2005 - Yuanyuan Zhou
Yuanyuan Zhou
Yuanyuan (YY) Zhou is a Qualcomm Chair Professor at University of California, San Diego, where she joined since 2009. Prior to UCSD, she was a tenured associate professor at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. From 2000-2002, she co-founded a storage startup called Emphora in Princeton, NJ. In 2007, She co-founded her second startup, Pattern Insight . Pattern Insight has deployed solutions used by many large companies. Dr. Zhou has made significant contributions in the interdisciplinary area of architecture and operating system. She is one of the first to create an architecture and operating system support for software debugging and to apply data mining to program analysis for bug detection. Her work has received wide attention inside and outside the architecture and operating system research community. Her recent projects include the ARTS project, which is one of the first investigating architecture and operating system support to improve software quality including robustness, reliability and availability. Her PSALM project is one of the pioneering projects in the direction of power management for data centers. She has received an NSF Career award, an IBM Faculty Award, and an IBM SUR award. Dr. Zhou also had 2 papers selected by IEEE Micro’s Top Picks from architecture conferences in 2004. In addition to her research contributions, Dr. Zhou actively reach out to women in computer science at all levels. At UIUC, she helped organize the first annual Undergraduate Women in Engineering camp in 2003 for first year students. In 2004, she participated in the CRA-W’s DREU project and hosted 2 women undergraduate students in summer projects. Additionally, she joined with several other women faculty members at UIUC to push the department to set up child-care grants for women with small children to travel to conferences.
2004 - Joanna McGrenere
Joanna McGrenere
Currently Dr. Joanna McGrenere is a Computer Science professor and Associate Head of Graduate Affairs at UBC. Joanna’s general philosophy of HCI teaching is that students learn best while doing hands-on team work, both large term projects and short activities. This philosophy is evident both in my graduate and undergraduate teaching. For example, she developed a new Advanced Methods in HCI undergrad course (CS 444) around a team-based learning model. In parallel, she set up the new HCI Learning Studio which follows a radically different model than traditional CS undergraduate labs in its emphasis on and facilitated support of team-based learning processes, and in supporting the creation of design artifacts and the HCI design process more generally. For her efforts she was awarded two Computer Science Incredible Instructor Awards: in 2004 for CS 544 and in 2011 for CS 444. Dr. McGrenere has made outstanding contributions to the field of Human Computer Interaction (HCI). Particularly relevant to this award is her leadership on the Aphasia Project – a large, multi-disciplinary effort spanning several academic fields, institutions and organizations in participatory technology research and design.
