2002 CRA A. Nico Habermann Award
presented to

Valerie Taylor

Valerie Taylor is an Associate Professor in the ECE Department at Northwestern University. As co-chair of the Coalition to Diversify Computing (CDC), Valerie has helped to make it a vibrant organization. Her leadership helped to make the first Richard Tapia Symposium to Celebrate Diversity in Computing a major success through her efforts and tireless determination. She has organized the Distributed Rap Sessions project for minority graduate students using the Access Grid, and initiated a new CDC membership drive that has attracted several young minority Ph.Ds.

Taylor has been an active member of the Grace Murray Hopper Conference since its beginning, serving as program chair in 2000 and as general chair of the upcoming September 2002 conference. She is a founding member of the Institute of African American E-Culture, an organization dedicated to instilling the notions of creativity and ownership of technology within the African-American community. She has built a very successful research record in high-performance computing in the performance of parallel scientific applications, computer architecture, and visual supercomputing environments. She is the PI on an NSF NGS Grant to develop an infrastructure for automating the process of performance modeling of parallel and distributed applications.

Professor Taylor is a P.I. with the Education, Outreach, and Training Partnership for Advanced Computational Structure. She participated in the Argonne Lab's Science in Search of Women program (an annual event to attract high-school women to careers in science and technology), and many conferences and workshops on minorities and women. She has been a member of CRA's Committee on the Status of Women.

Taylor is a volunteer mentor in a housing project in Chicago, where she teaches science and mathematics to minority children. In February, she was awarded the 2002 Path Breaker Award from the Women in Leadership at Northwestern University. She received her Bachelors (1985) and Masters (1986), degrees in Electrical Engineering from Purdue University, and her Ph.D. (1991) in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences from the University of California at Berkeley. Additional information is available on the web at: http://www.ece.northwestern.edu/~taylor