Ruth Lennon, current chair of ACM-W Europe, has been selected as the next Global Chair of ACM-W. Ruth is the director of Craobh Technology Consulting, an organization that provides personalized solutions to industry problems.

Ruth is also a Lecturer with 20 years of experience in the Department of Computing in Letterkenny Institute of Technology, Ireland. Ruth’s research interests focus on enterprise scale systems with a particular focus on DevOps and Cloud technologies. She has been a member of many technical panels and committees including chairing the NSAI/TC 2/SC 11 on cloud and distributed systems, and working on the IEEE 2675 DevOps standard. Ruth’s goal in DevOps is to ensure that security and performance are seen as core to development projects just as it is in configuration projects.

Ruth has been a member of the ACM for over 20 years and is the Chair of the ACM-W Europe. She has worked on projects to support and encourage women in computing and engineering career pathways for as long as she has been in the ACM. Highlighting the vital role that women can play in any technical team is core to her voluntary work.

When asked about her vision for ACM-W Ruth states, “I look forward to working with the team to define a strategic approach to build stronger international links in our global community of skilled, collaborative and enthusiastic researchers and practitioners. Over the next two years we will explore new ways to provide greater value to our members locally, regionally and globally.”

ACM-W would like to announce Dr. Minlan Yu as this year’s recipient of the ACM-W Rising Star Award. The ACM-W Rising Star Award recognizes a woman whose early-career research has had a significant impact on the computing discipline. 

Minlan Yu is a Gordon McKay Professor at the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University. Dr. Yu’s research focuses on redesigning the large-scale network infrastructure and making it fundamentally easier to manage many heterogeneous devices while achieving high performance and reliability for diverse applications. In particular, Dr. Yu has made groundbreaking contributions to network telemetry, performance diagnosis at fine timescales, offloading L4-L7 functions to programmable switches, and SDN-based network management. Dr. Yu’s work goes a full circle from important practical problems, transformative architectural design, creative algorithms and data structures, to end-to-end system design and implementations. 

Dr. Yu was recognized by various awards such as the NSF CAREER award, 10 Women in Networking/Communications That You Should Know in 2016, faculty awards from Google, Facebook, VMWare, and SIGCOMM doctoral dissertation award. Many of her works have led to deployed systems in the world’s largest production networks and adopted designs in commercial switch chips.  Her work has also resulted in IETF standards, patents, and open-source tools for developers and researchers. Before Harvard, Dr. Yu was faculty at Yale University and University of Southern California, a postdoctoral researcher at UC Berkeley, and obtained her Ph.D. in Computer Science from Princeton University.

Dr. Nutan Limaye is an associate professor in the Computer Science Department at IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark. Before this, she was an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, IIT Bombay, India. She finished her Ph.D. at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences (IMSc) Chennai, India in 2009. She did a one-year postdoc stint at TIFR Mumbai, before joining IIT Bombay in 2010. She was associated with the Association of Computing Machinery, India (ACM, India) as the vice-chair of the ACM-W from 2019 to 2021. She was also the treasurer for Indian Association for Research in Computing Science (IARCS), India from 2018 to 2020. She is an Associate Editor for ACM Transactions on Computation Theory (TOCT). She received the IRCC IIT Bombay Research Publication Award 2019. She has been on program committees of reputed theoretical computer science conferences such as STOC, FOCS, ITCS, and ICALP. Her research interests are in theoretical Computer Science. Specifically, she is interested in Algorithms and Complexity Theory. Her recent research has focussed on Algebraic Complexity Theory and Lower Bounds. 

Dr. My T. Thai is a University of Florida (UF) Research Foundation Professor of Computer & Information Science & Engineering and Associate Director of UF Nelms Institute for the Connected World. Dr. Thai’s current research interests include responsible AI, AI security and privacy, and optimization. The results of her work have led to 7 books and 250+ publications in highly ranked international journals and conferences, including several best papers awards from the IEEE and ACM.  

Dr. Thai has received many recognitions, notable ones including UF Research Foundation professorship, IoT Term Endowed professorship, NSF CAREER Award, and DTRA Young Investigator Award. She is an IEEE Fellow. Among many professional activities, Dr. Thai currently serves as an Editor-in-Chief (EiC) of the Journal of Combinatorial Optimization, EiC of the IET Blockchain journal, and a book series editor of Springer Optimization and its Applications. 

CHUNLEI TANG as a new member of the ACM-W leadership team is a research associate at Harvard Medical School. Tang received her PhD degree from Fudan University in Shanghai, China. Tang’s work begins with an innovative data-mining method built upon her doctoral work and applicable to various fields (e.g., finance, transportation, economics, insurance, bioinformatics, and sociology). She then endeavored to better match data products with their marketing capabilities by tackling business innovation. Inspired by business, she implemented a theoretical innovation for Data Science and proposed the (now-mainstream) definition of the data industry in 2013, stating that the data industry aims to bridge the gap between data science and economics. Being an author of The Data Industry: The Business and Economics of Information and Big Data (Wiley; 2016) and Data Capital: How Data is Reinventing Capital for Globalization (Springer; 2021), Dr. Tang is a recognized advocate for the Data Economy. She also serves as the Founder President of the Harvard Data Entrepreneurship Club. Her current focus is on applying innovation in healthcare, and she believes precision medicine is an application of the data industry.

Chair — ACM-W
Dr. Jodi Tims is a Professor of Computer Science at Baldwin Wallace University in Berea, OH…

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Vice Chair — ACM-W
Reyyan Ayer working at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey with a multitude of responsibilities…

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Chair — Celebrations Committee
Wendy Powley is a Lecturer in the School of Computing and the Faculty of Education at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario Canada…

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Chair — Communication Committee

Professor Yuqing Melanie Wu is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Pomona College…

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Chair — Professional Chapters Committee

Dr. Rachelle Kristof Hippler is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Baldwin Wallace University in Berea, OH…

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Co-Chair — Professional Chapters Committee

Laura Spencer is Development Release Manager for Ultimate Software in Weston, Florida…

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Chair — Community College Committee
Cindy Tucker is a Professor of Computer and Information Technologies at Bluegrass Community and Technical College (BCTC) in Lexington, KY….

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