CAPP-R

Advanced Career Mentoring Workshop for Women in Research Institutions

November 14&15, 2008
Inn at Lorretto in Santa Fe, New Mexico
Part of the CAPP Workshop.

Goal. The goal of the CAPP-R workshop is to help and advise associate professors at research colleges and universities get promoted to full professors. In addition, the workshop aims to build a cohort of senior women in academia and industry who can provide each other with an information network and mutual support.

Speakers. The Distinguished Researchers who will speak at CAPP-R are the following:

Workshop Structure. The CAPP-R focuses on helping associate professors at research colleges and universities get promoted to full professors. Some sessions will be divided into tracks with material of particular relevance to each of the three groups. Other sessions of general relevance will bring all participants together. Sessions specific to the CAPP-R track are likely to include:

  • Promotion to Full Professor, which will address differences in expectations, processes, and guidelines between promotion to associate professor and promotion to full professor. Differences between institutions will also be discussed. Panelists will describe their own path, discuss how to plan activities relevant and beneficial towards promotion, and how to deal with challenges along the road and strategies for handling them.
  • Managing Opportunities, which will discuss opportunities that arise in research institutions and how to best take advantage of them. These opportunities include pursuing an administrative position, transitioning to industry or government (and back again), and relocating to a different institution. It will discuss advantages and disadvantages, how to pursue and prepare for a change in position, deciding what to do when career opportunities arise, and how to ensure the position is to ones benefit. The panelists will highlight opportunities not to miss as well as opportunities to consider with caution. Panelists will describe choices they have made and strategies for positioning oneself for potential opportunities and how to deal with opportunities that you might not have anticipated.
  • Sabbaticals and Remote Collaborations, which will address how to effectively plan and execute a sabbatical or leave and how to start and carry out successful remote collaborations. Different strategies for managing successful collaborations will be discussed. Overall focus will be on how these activities can and should promote your own career.

Each such session will be lead by senior women from research labs with relevant experiences and will consist of a formal presentation and then an open discussion.

Plenary topics are likely to include panels on Time Management/Balancing Everything, Volunteerism, and Research Collaboration, each of which will include a representative from each of the three tracks. As with the track panels, each will include a formal presentation and an open discussion.

Optional CV Review. For interested participants, we will provide an opportunity for one-on-one CV review meetings with the Distinguished Professors and Researchers who are the speakers at the workshop.

Coaching Session. In addition to the above content, Nancy Houfek will lead a session on effective communication. Nancy, who serves as Head of Voice and Speech at the American Repertory Theatre/Institute for Advanced Theater Training at Harvard University, has served as a consultant on communication throughout the United States since 1978. Her portion of the workshop addresses the fact that many accomplished professional women feel themselves to be less effective than they wish when leading or participating in discussions, meetings, or group negotiations. They struggle with feeling unheard, with reactive rather than strategic behaviors, with physical stress and tension, and with ineffective speaking voices. The keys to success in such arenas are both strategic and physical: how one presents oneself and one's ideas is key to their acceptance. This session, which combines theatre training and leadership development in an interactive format that encourages highly personal learning, is designed to enhance women's abilities and confidence in such situations. It will teach participants techniques used in theatre and leadership programs to improve performance and will coach participants in strategic management of discussions and negotiations.

Speaker Biographies.

Nancy M. Amato is a professor of computer science at Texas A&M University, where she co-directs the Parasol Lab and is chair of the university-level Alliance for Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, and Systems Biology. She received undergraduate degrees in Mathematical Sciences and Economics from Stanford University, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from UC Berkeley and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She was an AT&T Bell Laboratories PhD Scholar, she is a recipient of a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation, she was a Distinguished Lecturer for the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society (2006-2007), and she has received numerous awards recognizing her contributions in research, teaching and service. She is an Editor of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Conference Editorial Board, is an Associate Editor of the International Journal of Computational Geometry and Applications, and served as an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation and of the IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, and she serves on review panels for NIH and NSF. She is a member of the Computing Research Association's Committee on the Status of Women in Computing Research (CRA-W) and of the Coalition to Diversity Computing (CDC), and she co-directs the CRA-W/CDC Distributed Research Experiences for Undergraduates (DREU) program (known as the DMP from 1994-2008) and co-directs the CRA-W/CDC Distinguished Lecture Series (DLS). Her main areas of research focus are parallel and distributed computing, computational biology and geometry, motion planning and robotics. Current representative projects include STAPL, a parallel C++ library enabling the development of efficient, portable parallel programs, the development of a new technique for modeling molecular motions (e.g., protein folding), and the investigation of new strategies for crowd control and simulation.

Elizabeth Bradley did her undergraduate and graduate work at MIT, interrupted by a one-year leave of absence to row in the 1988 Olympic Games, and has been with the Department of Computer Science at the University of Colorado at Boulder since January of 1993. Her research interests include nonlinear dynamics, artificial intelligence, and control theory. She is the recipient of a NSF National Young Investigator award, a Packard Fellowship, a Radcliffe Fellowship, and the 1999 student-voted University of Colorado College of Engineering teaching award.

Tracy Camp is a Professor of computer science at the Colorado School of Mines. She has received several grants from the National Science Foundation, including a CAREER award in 1997. This funding has produced 12 software packages that have been requested from (and shared with) more than 1300 researchers in 64 countries (as of June 2008). Dr. Camp is an ACM Distinguished Lecturer, an IEEE Senior Member, and an ACM Distinguished Scientist. In 2006, Dr. Camp was a Fulbright Scholar in New Zealand. In December 2007, Dr. Camp received the Board of Trustees Outstanding Faculty Award at the Colorado School of Mines, an award that has only been given five times between 1998-2007. Dr. Camp is currently the elected Treasurer of ACM's Special Interest Group on Mobile Computing (SIGMOBILE). Her research is in the field of ad hoc networks, and her articles have been cited over 2,500 times (per Google Scholar, as of June 2008). Dr. Camp shares her life with Max (born in 2000), Emma (born in 2003), her stay-at-home husband (Glen), and two pets (a cat Scully and a dog Jessie). All six of them are vegetarians who tremendously enjoy living in the foothills of the Rockies.

Lori A. Clarke is a member of the Computer Science faculty at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is vice chair of the Computing Research Association (CRA) and co-chair of CRA's Committee on the Status of Women in Computing Research (CRA-W). She is a former IEEE Distinguished Visitor, ACM National Lecturer, IEEE Publication Board member, associate editor of ACM TOPLAS and IEEE TSE, member of the CCR NSF advisory board, ACM SIGSOFT secretary/treasurer, vice-chair and chair. She has written numerous papers, served on many program committees, was general chair of the 2003 and program co-chair of the 1992 International Conference on Software Engineering. She has been a Principal Investigator on a number of NSF and DARPA projects. She received a B.A. (Mathematics, 1969) from the University of Rochester and a Ph.D. (Computer Science, 1976) from the University of Colorado. Dr. Clarke has worked in the area of software engineering, particularly on software analysis and testing for many years. She was one of the primary developers of symbolic execution, a technique used to reason about the behavior of software systems and for selecting test data, and made contributions in the areas of software architecture and object management. Recently her work has focused on analysis of concurrent systems. With colleagues, she has developed FLAVERS, a static analysis tool that uses data-flow analysis techniques to verify user-specified properties. FLAVERS allows users to simultaneously view and construct properties from templates of English language phrases or finite-state automata. The long-term goal is to develop techniques that well-trained software engineers can use to improve the quality of software systems.

Laura K. Dillon is a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Michigan State University (MSU), and served as department chair from 2003-2007. Before joining MSU in 1997, she spent 12 years on the faculty of the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). Currently, Laura is a Co-Chair of the 2008 Software Engineering Educators' Symposium, the Program Chair of the 2009 International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis, a Member-At-Large of the Executive Committee of ACM SIGSOFT, and an ACM Distinguished Lecturer. In 2007 she chaired the 1st Michigan Celebration of Women in Computing, which brought together over 100 students, faculty and IT professionals from Michigan and neighboring states to learn about rewards of careers in computing and needs for broadening diversity to further advance technology. Laura's research interests are in formal methods and programming languages. At UCSB, she headed the team that developed Real-Time Graphical Interval Logic, a dense-time temporal logic for specifying and reasoning about real-time properties of concurrent software systems. At MSU, she co-founded the Concurrent Software Design Group with Kurt Stirewalt. Their tool-supported "design for verification" (D4V) methodology leverages high-level, declarative synchronization contracts to simplify construction of system models that are verifiable and traceable to code and that support automated code generation.

Mary Jane Irwin received the M.S. (1975) and Ph.D. (1977) degrees in computer science from The University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Dr. Irwin has been on the faculty at Penn State since 1977. She received an Honorary Doctorate from Chalmers University, Sweden, in 1997 and the Penn State Engineering Society's Premier Research Award in 2001. She was awarded the ACM Distinguished Service Award and the CRA Distinguished Service Award, both in 2006. Dr. Irwin was named a Fellow of IEEE in 1995, a Fellow of ACM in 1996, was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2003. She was named the A. Robert Noll chair of Engineering in 2003 and an Evan Pugh Professor in 2006. Dr. Irwin co-leads (with Drs. Kandemir, Narayanan, and Xie) the Microsystems Design Lab with a focus on power and reliability aware design, embedded and mobile computing systems design, and emerging technologies in computing. Their research is supported by the National Science Foundation, the FCRP, Gigascale Systems Research Center, the Semiconductor Research Corporation, Intel Corporation, and Microsoft. Dr. Irwin is also collaborating with Dr. Raghavan in the development of adaptive software tools to co-manage quality-performance-power tradeoffs in large-scale scientific simulations.

Maja Mataric is a professor of Computer Science and Neuroscience at the University of Southern California, founding director of the USC Center for Robotics and Embedded Systems (cres.usc.edu), co-director of the USC Robotics Research Lab (robotics.usc.edu) and Senior Associate Dean for Research in the USC Viterbi School of Engineering. She also recently served as the elected president of the USC faculty and the Academic Senate. She received her PhD in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence from MIT in 1994, MS in Computer Science from MIT in 1990, and BS in Computer Science from the University of Kansas in 1987. She is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and recipient of the Okawa Foundation Award, NSF Career Award, the MIT TR100 Innovation Award, the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Early Career Award, the USC Viterbi School of Engineering Service Award and Junior Research Award, the Provost's Center for Interdisciplinary Research Fellowship, and is featured in the science documentary movie "Me & Isaac Newton." Prof. Mataric' is an associate editor of three major journals and has published extensively in various areas of robotics. She is actively involved in K-12 educational outreach, having obtained federal and corporate grants to develop free open-source curricular materials for elementary and middle-school robotics courses in order to engage student interest in STEM topics. Her Interaction Lab's research into socially assistive robotics is aimed at endowing robots with the ability to help people through individual assistance and team cooperation. Her current research is developing robot-assisted therapies for children with autism spectrum disorders, stroke survivors, and individuals with Alzheimer's Disease and other forms of dementia.

Vijaya Ramachandran is Blakemore Regents Professor of Computer Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research interests are in algorithm design and analysis, graph theory, data structures, parallel and cache-efficient computing, and machine models. A major current focus of her research is on algorithms for multicore computing. She is widely published in leading journals and conferences in theoretical computer science. Dr. Ramachandran received the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Princeton University and taught at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign prior to UT-Austin. She serves on the Editorial Boards of major journals in theoretical computer science, including Journal of the ACM, SIAM Journal on Computing, and ACM Transactions on Algorithms.

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