Mary Lou Soffa, the Owen
R. Cheatham Professor and Chair of Computer Science at the University of
Virginia, was the founder of CRA-W's Affiliate Distributed Mentoring Program
and co-founder (with Jan Cuny) of the
CRA-W
Graduate Student Cohort and the
Cohort for
Associate Professors. The Graduate Student Cohort program is now
bringing 200 women together annually for a two-day workshop. Soffa has
consistently been responsible for finding funding for these programs,
recently obtaining significant funding from industrial sources, even as the
programs have grown. She is also extremely active in individual mentoring.
She has graduated 21 PhD students and 54 MS students, and more than half of
these are women. Eight are tenured or tenure-track faculty members.
Soffa is active in minority enrollment
issues as well. As Dean of Arts and Sciences at University of Pittsburgh she
doubled the enrollment of minority students. Since 1992 she has been an
active advisor to Florida A&M, a historically black university, where she
substantially helped both the university administration and their ABET
accreditation. In 1999, Soffa won the Presidential Award for Excellence in
Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Mentoring.