Wednesday, September 9, 2015

Five Women in IT Selected to Participate in SCinet and Attend SC15

The 2014 SCinet team at last year's conference in New Orleans.
A collaboration between the University Corporations for Atmospheric Research (UCAR), the Department of Energy’s Energy Sciences Network (ESnet) and the Keystone Initiative for Network Based Education and Research (KINBER) are pleased to announce that five women IT professionals have been selected to receive  funding to actively participate in SCinet and attend the 2015 Supercomputing Conference (SC) in November 2015 in Austin, TX.

The collaboration called “Women in IT Networking at SC (WINS)” developed the program in an effort to expand the diversity of the SCinet volunteer staff and provide professional development opportunities to highly qualified women in the field of networking. The funding is provided by the National Science Foundation (NSF) as a supplemental award to the Rocky Mountain Cyberinfrastructure Mentoring and Outreach Alliance (RMCMOA) grant under the CC*IIE program.

Created each year for SC, SCinet brings to life a very high-capacity network -- exceeding one Terabit of capacity -- that supports the revolutionary HPC applications and experiments that are the hallmark of the SC conference. Volunteers from academia, government and industry work together to design and deliver SCinet. Planning begins more than a year in advance of each SC conference and culminates in a high-intensity installation in the days leading up to the conference.

The WINS collaboration received 19 highly qualified applicants from a diverse set of organizations across the US.  The candidates applications were reviewed by  an expert panel of research and education community leaders, including: Wendy Huntoon (led), Greg Bell (ESnet), John Hernandez (UCAR), Jennifer Schopf (IU), and Linda Winkler (ANL).

The awardees have been notified and have accepted this exceptional opportunity.  The candidates will be paired with a SCinet team and mentor.  The awardees are:

•    Sana Bellamine, CENIC, Measurement Team
•    Debbie Fligor, University of Illinois, Routing Team
•    Amy Liebowitz, University of Michigan,  Commodity Team
•    Megan Sorensen, Idaho State University, Wireless Team
•    Kyongseon (Kathy) West, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Network Security Team

The WINS collaboration, comprised of Marla Meehl (UCAR), Mary Hester (ESnet), Wendy Huntoon (KINBER), Lauren Rotman (ESnet), and Jason Zurawski (ESnet), looks forward to meeting and working with the awardees.  This effort focuses on fostering gender diversity in the research and education (R&E) community’s network and computer systems engineer occupations. If successful, the team hopes to work with SC and NSF to continue and expand this program next year.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Expanding diversity would not be so easy task but there are some good guidelines which will indeed guide us what should we actually needs to done with, and this would of course bring something more good to our own. sop for computer science