Who is who | ACM-W supporting, celebrating and advocating for Women in Computing

Welcome to our new ACM-W Website Manager!

Chandra Burnham is our new ACM-W Website Manager, effective September 2022. Chandra is a full-stack software engineer at JPMorgan Chase & Co. in Seattle, Washington. She completed her Bachelors of Science in Computer Science with a minor in Informatics in 2022 at the University of Washington, United States.

At JPMorgan Chase, Chandra participates in firm-wide diversity and inclusion efforts such as Women on the Move, the company’s initiative to support women in their careers. During her undergraduate studies, Chandra served as an officer for both her university’s ACM-W and ACM student chapters, helping to coordinate community-building events, design marketing graphics, and develop the student chapter websites. Chandra also volunteered as a computer science mentor for middle and high school girls through the University of Washington’s Girls Who Code Club in 2020. In 2021, Chandra was selected to be a representative for ACM-W at the 2021 Grace Hopper Celebration, raising awareness about ACM-W’s impact and encouraging attendees to get involved in their local chapters. Chandra looks forward to continuing her service with ACM-W at the global level.

Welcome to our new ACM-W Newsletter Editor!

Taneea S Agrawaal
ACM-W Newsletter Editor

Taneea S Agrawaal will be the next ACM-W Newsletter Editor, effective September 2022. Taneea is a PhD student in the Computer Science Department at University of Toronto, Canada. She completed her Bachelors in Technology from IIIT Delhi, India in 2018, and worked as an Engineering Associate at Goldman Sachs, India before starting her graduate study in 2021.

Taneea’s research work is interdisciplinary. She combines Human-Computer Interaction techniques with Climate Science, exploring the role of social values in Climate Science, with a special focus on climate-vulnerable groups. She is an alumnus of Rails Girls Summer of Code (RGSoC) 2016 and has also served on the program committee of RGSoC 2020. Taneea has been an active participant in several diversity initiatives in India, and has led the Rails Girls New Delhi and Indian Women in Engineering chapters. An avid reader with a penchant for writing, she also led the blog and the literary society at IIIT Delhi. She has continually mentored students in Computer Science since she first went to university. Most recently, she has been involved with HER Code Camp and Graduate Application Assistance Program (GAAP) in Toronto.

Welcome to our new ACM-W Regional Activities Co-Chair!

Nutan Limaye,
ACM-W Regional Activities Co-Chair

Dr Nutan Limaye will be the next Regional Activities Co-Chair of ACM-W, effective September 2022. Dr 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 PhD 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 of the 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.

Cigdem Sengul selected as the next ACM-W Communications co-Chair

Cigdem Sengul, current communications chair and secretary of ACM-W Europe, will be the next Communications Co-Chair of ACM-W, effective July 2022.

Cigdem is a Senior Lecturer at Brunel University, UK. Since 2002, she has worked and led projects in various R&D groups in the USA and Europe. She is an expert on communication networks, privacy and security, focusing on constrained and decentralised systems.

Cigdem has been a member of the ACM for over 15 years. She has been serving in the communications team in ACM-W Europe since 2015. She started as a working group volunteer and has served as its chair for the last four years. She has initiated and worked on many projects to highlight the achievement of women in computing and engineering within ACM. Cigdem is passionate about making computing more diverse. She is the Athena SWAN¹ lead for the Computer Science Department and Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion college champion at Brunel.

Cigdem is very excited to join the ACM-W as the Communications Co-Chair: “I am delighted to join Bettina Bair to work on projects that will strive to amplify the voices of our global community.”

[1] A framework which is used across the globe to support and transform gender equality within higher education (HE) and research. Link: https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/equality-charters/athena-swan-charter

Ruth Lennon selected as the next ACM-W Chair

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.”

ACMW- Rising Star Award Recipient: Minlan Yu

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.

Meet Nutan Limaye, Global Director, Celebrations Project

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.

Meet My T. Thai, ACM-W Standing Committees Co-Chair

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.

Meet Chunlei Tang, ACM-W Co-Treasurer

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.