CRA Announces Awards for Service

By CRA

The CRA Board of Directors has selected Susan L. Graham, Pehong Chen Distinguished Professor Emerita at UC Berkeley, for the Computing Research Association Distinguished Service Award 2012. Graham was selected in recognition of the extraordinary contributions that she has made over more than three decades of dedicated and selfless service and leadership.Graham has served on countless departmental review committees, editorial committees, award selection committees, advisory committees, program committees, and search committees for both the NSF Assistant Directorship for CISE and the Harvard Presidency. She served on the President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC) from 1997-2003; on the Working Group of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology to assess the Federal Networking and Information Technology Research and Development Program in 2010; and has been Vice Chair of the Computing Community Consortium from 2006-present.

As a member of PITAC, in addition to providing important guidance on the “mainstream” work of the committee, Susan served as Co-Chair of the Subcommittee on Open Source Software for High-End Computing, and as Co-Chair of the Subcommittee on Learning and Education. These activities helped to establish the foundation for today’s view of computer science as an expansive discipline whose advancements are essential to all aspects of our lives.

As a member of a Working Group of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and

Technology (PCAST) to assess the Federal Networking and Information Technology Research and Development Program, Susan was instrumental in creating the outline of the report, assigning the sections, editing the member contributions into a coherent whole, writing the crucial Executive Summary, dealing with the politics of comments and revisions, and marketing the report in Washington. While many others made important contributions, the co-chair of the working group stated, “I can say with utter certainty that there would have been no PCAST report without Susan.”

A. Nico Habermann Award Winners 2012

The CRA Board of Directors has selected Lucy Sanders, CEO, National Center for Women & Information Technology; Robert Schnabel, Dean, School of Informatics, Indiana University; and Telle Whitney, CEO and President of the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology to receive the 2012 A. Nico Habermann Award.

The award is given for their joint efforts to establish and sustain NCWIT, a national resource dedicated to encouraging greater participation of women in the development of computing technology. Each of these individuals has played an essential role in NCWIT’s creation and success.

In 2003, Lucy, Bobby, and Telle had a vision of creating a national center that would bring together institutions, organizations, and individuals committed to the goal of increasing the participation of women and girls in information technology. The stakeholders of this center would span academia, industry, K-12 educators, and entrepreneurs. The center would facilitate sharing of promising practices among its members, incorporate social science research about the impact of gender in computing careers and the effectiveness of intervention strategies, and create a community of change agents challenging each other to amplify their efforts toward this goal. It would provide a forum for greater cooperation and communication among various organizations working in this space (e.g., ABI, CRA-W, MentorNet, ACM, and the Girl Scouts are all current NCWIT members).

NCWIT’s impact on the computing research community is especially evident in the activities of its Academic Alliance and Workforce Alliance. The Academic Alliance, comprised of nearly 200 colleges and universities, has focused on recruitment and retention of undergraduate and graduate women students, as well as making the overall climate within their CISE departments more supportive of women students and women faculty. The Workforce Alliance, whose members include corporations with the premier research labs, is dedicated to recruiting and advancing technical women in corporate R&D. As one professor commented, ”In a short time, Lucy, Bobby, and Telle raised the visibility of computing’s gender imbalance and distributed effective tools and practices for amplifying and quickening progress on this important issue.”

Awards for Service to CRA

Eric Grimson, CRA Board Chair, has selected Phil Bernstein, Microsoft Research, and Carla Romero, Administrative Director at the McCune Charitable Foundation in Santa Fe, as recipients of Service to CRA Awards. The Service to CRA Award recognizes outstanding service to CRA as an organization.

Phil Bernstein is recognized for his work as CRA's Treasurer; he was instrumental in putting CRA on a sound fiscal basis including working to install sound financial controls.

Carla Romero is recognized for her many years of superb service as CRA's Director of Programs, working primarily with CRA-W and CDC to create, implement and evaluate their programs.All of the awards will be presented on July 23 at the 2012 CRA Conference at Snowbird.