Today SIGHPC announced the 12 recipients of the ACM SIGHPC/Intel Computational and Data Science Fellowships for 2017. The fellowship is funded by Intel, and is presented each year at the annual SC conference. It was established to increase the diversity of students pursuing graduate degrees in data science and computational science, including women as well as students from racial/ethnic backgrounds that have been historically underrepresented in the computing field. The fellowship provides $15,000 annually for study anywhere in the world.
The demographics of the computing workplace aren’t going to change unless we make some critical investments,” explains Cherri Pancake, ACM Vice President and professor and Intel Faculty Fellow in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Oregon State University. “Efforts to raise awareness of the need for diversity, and to recruit new students into the pipeline, are necessary components of change — but they only take life with investment. We are grateful to Intel for their leadership in working with ACM to make these fellowships a reality.”
Students were nominated by their graduate advisors. Nominees spanned disciplines from finance and robotics to managing personal health data, and represented large, mid-sized, and small institutions in 25 countries. 80% of nominees were female, and 40% were identified as an underrepresented minority in their country of study. The nominations were evaluated and ranked by a panel of experts (who were themselves diverse with respect to race, gender, discipline, and nationality) based on nominees’ overall potential for excellence in data science and/or computational science, and the extent to which they will serve as leaders and role models to increase diversity in the workplace.
Of the 12 students named as winners this year, nine are women and six are underrepresented minorities in their country of study. They are pursuing MS and PhD degrees in a variety of applied fields:
- Kellon Belfon, PhD candidate, Stony Brook University
- Linda Gesenhues, PhD candidate, Fed. Univ. of Rio de Janeiro
- Ananya Gupta, PhD candidate, University of Manchester
- Maciej Kos, PhD Candidate, Northeastern University
- Jessica Micallef, PhD Candidate, Michigan State University
- Shannon Moran, PhD candidate, University of Michigan
- Santiago Núñez-Corrales, PhD candidate, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Laura Palacio Tamayo, MS candidate, University of Medellín
- Minu Pilvankar, PhD candidate, Oklahoma State University
- Shefali Umrania, MS candidate, Carnegie Mellon University
- Valeri Vasquez, PhD candidate, University of California, Berkeley
- Emma Zohner, PhD candidate, Rice University
Funding will be awarded in August. The winners will receive travel support to attend SC17 in Denver, Colorado (USA), where they will be recognized during the awards ceremony. They will also receive a complimentary membership in SIGHPC for the duration of their fellowship.
New advances in data science and the ever-more-powerful tools available to scientists are opening up more opportunities for meaningful careers that address some of society’s most critical challenges,” said Trish Damkroger, VP of Technical Computing at Intel Corporation. “Through this fellowship, ACM SIGHPC and Intel are helping to open up these opportunities to everyone.”
