17 women were selected this year to receive a Scholarship for Women Studying Information Security (SWSIS). The SWSIS program provides scholarships for women studying for their Bachelors and Masters degrees in fields relating to information security. The purpose of these scholarships is to provide assistance to women at the formative stages of their careers in these fields.
Today, May 20, 2021, marks the tenth Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD). The purpose of GAAD is to get everyone talking, thinking and learning about digital access/inclusion and people with different disabilities. In honor of GAAD, we’re sharing resources to learn more about accessibility in higher education.
Are you interested in serving as a mentor or coach?
The mentor and coach application is now available on the CS Grad4US Mentoring Program webpage.
The goals of the CSGrad4US Mentoring Program are:
Specific topics include the admissions process, preparation of all components of a strong graduate application, differences between graduate programs at different institutions, how to compare programs with respect to the Fellow’s goals and background, and general guidelines on making a selection among admission acceptances.
The CSGrad4US Mentoring Program will provide not only general graduate application advice and guidance, but also provide missing larger context and network to students returning from the workforce. Our intention is to recruit a representative set of mentors and coaches that reflects the diversity of institutions, demographics, and scholarship among the computing research community.
Applications received by June 1st will be given preference.
The Application deadline for the CSGrad4US Graduate Fellowship has been extended and is now due May 19, 2021, by 5:00 pm submitter local time. Please visit https://www.nsf.gov/cise/CSGrad4US/ for additional details and deadlines.
The National Science Foundation (NSF) Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Directorate has announced the new CSGrad4US Graduate Fellowship program that aims to increase the number of diverse, domestic graduate students pursuing research and innovation careers in the CISE fields. The new fellowship, which will provide 3-year fellowship opportunities for new Ph.D. students in the computing disciplines, was released in response to the increased demand for people with a Ph.D. in computer science (CS), the continued decrease of domestic students pursuing research and completing a Ph.D., and the overall small number of bachelor’s degree recipients in CS pursuing graduate school.
By Erik Russell
The Computing Research Association’s Committee on Widening Participation organizes two Grad Cohort Workshops on an annual basis. Both workshops will be virtual events this year due to the ongoing pandemic. The 2021 CRA-WP Grad Cohort Workshop for Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, Accessibility, and Leadership Skills (IDEALS) will be held on March 11-12, 2021 and the 2021 CRA-WP Grad Cohort Workshop for Women will be held on April 23-24, 2021.
By Jan Cuny, Northeastern University, et al.
Education presents a complex and confusing landscape. The traditional view of a CS education pipeline flowing from elementary through secondary, postsecondary, and graduate education is an oversimplification – one that may hinder our efforts to diversify computing. This simplification encourages a focus on educational efforts based on retention across stages and the traditional transitions between them, ignoring the fact that successful students may enter or re-enter CS education through a variety of nonstandard onramps.
A video recording of the “Standing Against Racial Injustices” conversation series organized by the Center for Minorities and People with Disabilities in IT (CMD-IT) is now available. If you missed the event, we encourage you watch and share using the link below.
Standing Against Racial Injustices: Commanding Our Voices
Video Now Available
The second part of the Standing Against Racial Injustice conversation brings together a group of Black industry tech professionals for a breadth of conversation on how we create the change we want to see and how Commanding Our Voices drives Inclusion, Innovation and Impact to our community, society and the nation. Rose Robinson, Executive Director at CMD-IT, moderates a great panel discussion with Black professionals from industry.
Thirteen women across the country were awarded SWSIS scholarships for their work in cybersecurity. The purpose of these scholarships is to provide assistance to women at the formative stages of their careers in these fields.
Sara Stehlik was the first recipient of the PrinSWSIS scholarship, awarded to a woman aspiring to work in computer security, and by her mere existence, challenging the stereotype of a cyber security professional and helping redefine what it means to be a princess.
Peggy Sue Mathis was the recipient of this year’s Rebecca Gurley Bace SWSIS Scholarship, meant to honor the memory of Becky Bace by selecting a scholarship recipient who shows her ability to mentor, create community, and bring groups together.
Congratulations to all the 2020 recipients:
Elizabeth Anne Cerrone, Pennsylvania State University-Main Campus
Jennie Elizabeth Christensen, University of California-Santa Barbara
Julianne Cox, Volunteer State Community College
Meron Kebede, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
Swathi Krithivasan, University of Maryland-Baltimore County
Morgan Livingston, University of California-Berkeley
Angela Ma, University of Maryland, College Park
Peggy Sue Mathis, University of Alabama in Huntsville
Sara Elizabeth Robinson-Camarena, Cochise College
Sarah Lynn Sha, Indiana University-Bloomington
Annette Stawsky, Cornell University
Sara Stehlik, Dakota State University
Samra Vithlani, University of Southern California
On March 5-7, 2020, CRA-WP hosted the 2020 Grad Cohort for Underrepresented Minorities and Persons with Disabilities (URMD) Workshop in Austin, TX. Now in its third year, the workshop brought together approximately 200 graduate students from groups that are underrepresented in computing (including Alaska Native, Black/African American, Hispanic, Native American, Native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islander, and/or Persons with Disabilities). Collectively, they represented a diverse set of computing-related research areas and more than 90 institutions. By developing meaningful connections with a focus on mentoring and community building, the workshop aims to increase representation from these groups in computing research. Graduate students also learn research skills and career strategies from experienced researchers and professionals.
CRA-WP welcomes Sandhya Dwarkadas as its newest co-chair. She joins Andrea Danyluk as co-chair, serving a 2-year term.
Sandhya Dwarkadas is the Albert Arendt Hopeman Professor of Engineering and Professor and Chair of Computer Science at the University of Rochester, with a secondary appointment in Electrical and Computer Engineering. She received her Bachelor’s from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, India, and her M.S. and Ph.D. from Rice University. Her research lies at the interface of hardware and software with a particular focus on concurrency, resulting in over a 100 refereed publications that cross areas within systems. She has made contributions to hardware- and software-based shared memory implementations and system reconfigurability. She is co-inventor on 11 granted U.S. patents. She is a CRA-W board member, and is currently on the editorial board of CACM Research Highlights and IEEE Micro. Her recent research focuses on addressing the challenge of leveraging the computational power of the increasingly large core counts available on today’s processors. Her research addresses the challenge at three levels — via scalable hardware cache coherence protocols, via improved language and runtime support for expressing and extracting application parallelism, and via operating system-level energy and resource management. She also continues to stay involved in parallel applications development, particularly in the biomedical domain.
CRA-WP would like to thank Margaret Martonosi and Julia Hirschberg for their past service and contribution to all CRA-WP programs.
