ABI-ONE ghc program v14.indd - Grace Hopper Celebration of ...

ANITA BORG SOCIAL IMPACT AWARD WINNER
Ann Quiroz Gates
ThuRSDAY, 7:00 – 9:00 PM – CENTENNIAL BALLROOM I-IV
FRIDAY, 4:15 – 5:15 PM – SINGAPORE/MANILA
uNDERWRITTEN BY MICROSOFT RESEARCh
The fifth Anita Borg Social Impact Award, an international prize, honors an individual
who has caused technology to have a positive impact on the lives of women and society or
who has caused women to have a significant impact on the design and use of technology.
The recipient of the 2010 Anita Borg Social Impact Award receives a $10,000 award.
Dr. Ann Quiroz Gates is the Associate Vice-President of Research and
Sponsored Projects at the University of Texas (UTEP) at El Paso. As the
founder of the Computing Alliance for Hispanic serving institutions
(CAHSI), Dr. Gates is dedicated to and has been highly successful in
the retention, recruitment, and advancement of Hispanic women in computing.
Under Ann’s leadership, CAHSI institutions have reinforced the academic pipeline
at three critical intervention stages: the transition from high school to college, college
to graduate school, and graduate school to the professoriate. In the first stage, a lack
of preparedness and prior experience in computing are unforgiving gatekeepers. Ann
and her colleagues have employed graphics and animation technology to attract and
engage students unfamiliar to programming, problem solving, and computational
thinking. In addition, she promotes a model that extends the number of students
involved in research through inclusion of theose who have the capability, but who
have not considered research. This develops the skills students need to be successful.
The third key stage supports transitions from graduate school into the professoriate.
Transferring effective practices from a $3.5M NSF ADVANCE grant funding at
UTEP to create a cohort at the professoriate level, Ann and her CAHSI colleagues
have focused on increaseing the participation and advancement of women in
academic science and engineering careers. The numbers demonstrate the real significance
of Ann’s contributions. Ann’s leadership and vision has been instrumental to
CAHSI’s many achievements. To drive profound change in industry hiring practices
it is crucial to produce a sizeable population of skilled women and minorities within
the computing workforce. Ann’s establishment of CAHSI and its initiatives at the
first stage of the academic pipeline, from high school to college, directly addresses this
challenge.
To successfully compete for NSF funding for CAHSI, to pull together the diverse
group of institutions and leadership that constitute the CAHSI alliance, to successfully
navigate these institutions through the politically charged and financially
constrained waters of their respective state and institutional leadership, and finally to
be renewed for a second round of NSF funding – all these achievements are clearly
demonstrative of the relentlessness of Ann’s vision to change the face of computing.
Ann’s impact has no geographical boundaries, and her work can easily be extended
to other countries, particularly those in Central and South America, which have
sizeable Latino populations. Ann’s leadership is making a significant social impact by
increasing the number of Latinos and Latinas graduating from college and seeking
graduate studies in STEM fields. Her outreach efforts have demonstrated her
commitment to ensure an effective pipeline from academia into industry.
About Ann Quiroz Gates
Ann Quiroz Gates is the Associate Vice
President of Research and Sponsored
Projects at the University of Texas at
El Paso and past chair of the Computer
Science Department. Her research
areas are software property elicitation
and specification, and workflow-driven
ontologies. Gates directs the NSF-funded
Cyber-ShARE Center that focuses on
developing and sharing resources through
cyber-infrastructure to advance research
and education in science. She was a
founding member of the NSF Advisory
Committee for Cyberinfrastructure, and
she served on the Board of Governors
of IEEE-Computer Society 2004-2009.
Gates leads the Computing Alliance for
Hispanic-Serving Institutions (CAHSI),
an NSF-funded consortium that is
focused on the recruitment, retention,
and advancement of Hispanics in
computing and is a founding member
of the National Center for Women in
Information Technology (NCWIT), a
national network to advance participation
of women in IT. Gates received the 2009
Richard A. Tapia Achievement Award for
Scientific Scholarship, Civic Science, and
Diversifying Computing and was named
to Hispanic Business magazine’s 100
Influential Hispanics in 2006 for her work
on the Affinity Research Group model that
focuses on development of undergraduate
students involved in research. She
received her Ph.D. from New Mexico
State University in 1994.
86 Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology | Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing