Taylor and van Dam Win CRA Service Awards

Valerie Taylor, Northwestern University, and Andries van Dam, Brown University, are the winners of CRA's two service awards for 2002. Taylor will receive the A. Nico Habermann Award; van Dam the Distinguished Service Award. Both will be presented on the evening of July 15 at CRA's Conference at Snowbird.

CRA presents these two awards, usually annually, to individuals for outstanding service to the computing research community. The A. Nico Habermann Award honors the late A. Nico Habermann, former head of NSF's Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate. This award is given to an individual who has played a leadership role in aiding members of underrepresented groups within the computing research community. It recognizes work in areas of government affairs, educational programs, professional societies, and public awareness. The Distinguished Service Award recognizes service in the areas of government affairs, professional societies, publications, or conferences, and leadership that has a major impact on computing research.

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

Andries van Dam is the Thomas J. Watson, Jr., University Professor of Technology and Education and Professor of Computer Science at Brown University. He has been on Brown's faculty since 1965, and was one of the department's founders and its first chairman from 1979 to 1985. He is a principal investigator, and was the director from 1996-98, in the NSF Science and Technology Center for Graphics and Visualization, a research consortium including Brown, Caltech, Cornell, North Carolina (Chapel Hill), and the University of Utah.

Professor van Dam, who served as CRA's board chair from 1985-87, was nominated because of his extensive influence over a number of years in many different areas. He has shown leadership in his sub-discipline and in the computing field as a whole. He has helped to establish several new disciplines, including graphics, hypertext, and distributed computing. He co-founded ACM SIGGRAPH, as well as the Institute for Research for Information and Scholarship and the Technology Center for Advanced Scientific Computing and Visualization, both at Brown University.

Professor van Dam has served on the technical advisory boards of several companies, including Microsoft Research, and on several NSF and NAE advisory committees--ACM Curriculum '68; CRA; CSTB; NSF/CISE Advisory Committee; NAE Committee on Engineering Education; and CS departmental advisory committees (Georgia Tech and Princeton). He has promoted standards in the graphics community, and served as editor of multiple journals, such as ACM Transactions on Graphics; Computer Graphics and Image Processing; and IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics.

Andy van Dam has inspired large numbers of students to go into academic and industrial research careers. He has been involved with many startup companies as an advisor. His written contributions are prolific, and he has received numerous awards for technical work, including ACM Karl V. Karlstrom Award; IEEE James H. Mulligan, Jr., Education Medal; the ACM SIGSCE Award for Outstanding Contributions to Computer Science Education; the SIGGRAPH Steven A. Coons Award, and the 2001 Harriet W. Sheridan Award for Distinguished Contribution to Teaching and Learning.

Professor van Dam is a Fellow of IEEE, ACM, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a member of NAE. He received the B.S. degree with Honors in Engineering Sciences from Swarthmore College in 1960, and the M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1963 and 1966, respectively. He holds honorary Ph.D.s from Swarthmore and Darmstadt Technical University. Additional information is available on his website at: http://www.cs.brown.edu/people/avd/