Candy Culhane from LANL is the chair of the Emerging Woman Leader award committee
Awards like this serve two purposes,” observes Candy Culhane, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and chair of the Emerging Woman Leader award committee. “The obvious benefit is the recognition and exposure that can come from receiving an award like this one. But, just as important, over time the recipients of this award will serve as models of success that can encourage others as they start their own careers.”
In the fields of high performance and technical computing – as elsewhere in computing – there are fellowships and awards for achievements occurring at the graduate student, early-career, and mature-career stages. There are, however, very few awards recognizing individuals in the middle stage of their careers.
We believe this award fills a real need in our community,” said Cherri Pancake, past chair of SIGHPC and current Vice President of ACM. “These are the years when people are moving upward in their careers. It’s a period that can be especially challenging for women, who often have to juggle child or parent care as well as job demands.” Pancake worked with Becky Verastegui, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and former SIGHPC Treasurer, to create this award.
“Technical computing” includes all of the various fields that are part of what we think of as HPC – areas such as visualization, analytics, operations, scientific application software (creation and porting/tuning), libraries, and so on – as well as professionals working with everything from small, workgroup-sized systems, to leading systems on the TOP500 list.
The ACM SIGHPC Emerging Woman Leader in Technical Computing (EWL/TC) is a biennial award open to any woman who has engaged in HPC and technical computing research, education, and/or practice for 5-15 years since receiving her highest degree. This international award creates a new career milestone achievement, and consists of a $2,000 honorarium, travel support to the SC conference, and a recognition plaque.
Nominations are open now and close June 30, with the winner announced in July.
