2023 CRA-WP Early Career Award Winners Announced! | Robin Brewer & Michael Carbin

The 2023 winners for the Borg Early Career Award and Skip Ellis Early Career award have been selected!

2023 BECA Recipient | Robin Brewer, University of Michigan

2023 SEECA Recipient | Michael Carbin, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The CRA-WP Early Career Awards are in honor of two notable computer scientist pioneers, Anita Borg and Clarence “Skip” Ellis.

2023 BECA Winner:

Robin Brewer is the 2023 recipient of the Borg Early Career Award. Brewer is an Assistant Professor in the School of Information at the University of Michigan whose research is at the intersection of human-computer interaction, accessibility, and social computing. She studies how older adults and people with disabilities engage with technology, leveraging the strengths of these communities to design for connection, expression, and agency. Robin co-directs the Accessibility, Human-Computer Interaction, and Aging (AHA) lab, is a faculty affiliate of the Center for Ethics, Society, and Computing, and is an affiliated faculty member with the Digital Studies Institute. Robin’s research has been funded by an NSF CAREER award (2022), Google (2022), the National Institutes of Health (2022), the Retirement Research Foundation (2020), and the Department of Transportation (2018). She was also awarded the prestigious President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Michigan (2017).

Throughout her career, Robin has volunteered for and co-organized mentoring programs for women and people of color, including the CHI Mentoring Program (CHIMe) at the ACM CHI conference and a virtual writing group for Black women in computing fields. She has also developed curricula and taught computational and design thinking to middle and high school girls with Brave Initiatives in Chicago, Detroit, Hamtramck, and Kingston, Jamaica. Robin received her B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Maryland, College Park, M.S. in Human-Centered Computing from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and Ph.D. in Technology and Social Behavior from Northwestern University.

2023 SEECA Winner:

Michael Carbin is the 2023 recipient of the Skip Ellis Early Career Award. Carbin is an Associate Professor of EECS at MIT and Founding Advisor at MosaicML. At MIT, he leads the Programming Systems Group. Typical goals for his work include improved reliability, performance, energy consumption, and resilience for computer systems using techniques from Programming Languages.

Michael has received an NSF CAREER Award, a Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship, and a MIT Frank E. Perkins Award for Excellence in Graduate Advising. His work has received best paper awards at OOPSLA, ICLR, and ICFP. His work has also received a CACM Research Highlight.

Michael received a B.S. in Computer Science from Stanford University in 2006, and an S.M. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2009 and 2015, respectively. Michael was also a Researcher at Microsoft Research, working on Deep Learning Systems from 2014 to 2018.

Learn more about the Nomination Criteria by visiting our Early Career Awards page.

 

Borg Early Career Award:

The CRA-WP Borg Early Career Award (BECA) has been a distinguished award established in 2004. Anita Borg was chosen for this award title for her efforts in helping shape a community for women in computer science. Borg was an early member of CRA-WP and the award is inspired by her commitment to increasing the participation of women in computing research. One of her most memorable efforts was confounding the “Systers” community, which began as an emailing list for women in the computer “systems” field. This effort resulted in a movement of empowerment for women in the computer science field. The BECA, is an annual award given to a woman in computer science and/or engineering who has made significant research contributions in computer science and/or engineering and has also contributed to the profession, especially in outreach to women.

To learn more about Anita Borg.

 

Skip Ellis Early Career Award:

The CRA-WP “Skip” Ellis Early Career Award (SEECA) is our newest award, it was established in 2020 to distinguish researchers who are underrepresented in computing research. Clarence “Skip” Ellis was chosen for this award title for his efforts in encouraging students of all backgrounds to stretch their academic abilities and to consider careers in computer science. He wanted his students to create their perspectives of themselves, and not be influenced by what society thought they were capable of. Ellis was the first African American to earn a Ph.D. in computer science (1969) and the first African-American to be elected a Fellow of the ACM (1998). The SEECA is an annual award given to a person who identifies as a member of a group underrepresented in computing (African American, Latinx, Native American/First Peoples, and/or People with Disabilities), who has made significant research contributions in computer science and/or engineering and has also contributed to the profession, especially in outreach to underrepresented populations and broadening participation.

To learn more about Clarence “Skip” Ellis.