ANITA BORG INSTITUTE ANNOUNCES 2008 SOCIAL IMPACT, TECHNICAL LEADERSHIP, AND DENICE DENTON EMERGING LEADER AWARD WINNERS
Prominent Women in Technology to Be Honored at Awards Ceremony in Keystone, Colorado Oct 2nd 2008, During Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing
PALO ALTO, Calif. — Sept. 29, 2008 —The Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology (ABI) announced today the winners of this year’s Anita Borg Social Impact and Technical Leadership Awards and the Denice Denton Emerging Leader Award. The winners will be honored for their accomplishments and contributions to women in technology at an awards ceremony on October 2, 2008, during ABI’s 8th Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing in Keystone, Colorado.
The Anita Borg Social Impact Award honors an individual or team that has caused technology to have a positive impact on the lives of women and society or has caused women to have a significant impact on the design and use of technology. The 2008 award winner is BlogHer. Founded in February 2005 as a labor of love by bloggers Elisa Camahort Page, Jory Des Jardins, and Lisa Stone, BlogHer’s mission is to create opportunities for women who blog to pursue exposure, education, and community and economic empowerment. Today BlogHer provides the number-one community for and guide to blogs by women via annual conferences, a Web community, and blogging news hub. BlogHer offers a publishing syndicate of more than 2,200 qualified, contextually targeted blog affiliates. The Anita Borg Social Impact Award is underwritten by Microsoft.
The Anita Borg Technical Leadership Award is given to a woman who has inspired the women’s technology community through outstanding technological and social contributions. This year’s winner, AT&T Fellow Elaine Weyuker, has had a career of firsts: She was the first woman to receive a doctorate in computer science from Rutgers University; the first female faculty member at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at NYU; and is the only female AT&T Fellow. A leader in the software-engineering research community, Dr. Weyuker specializes in software testing, reliability assessment, metrics and measurement, and empirical studies; and is a fellow of both ACM and IEEE. The Anita Borg Technical Leadership Award is underwritten by Cisco.
The Denice Denton Award is given each year to a junior non-tenured faculty member under the age of 40 at an academic or research institution who is pursuing high-quality research in any field of engineering or physical sciences while contributing significantly to promoting diversity in his/her environment. The 2008 Denice Denton Award winner is Naomi Chesler, an associate professor in the department of biomedical engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A leading researcher in biomedical engineering, Dr. Chesler has steadfastly pursued diversity and gender equity in engineering academia, both nationally and locally, while maintaining the highest standards of scholarly research. Her accomplishments can be summarized in terms of her application of engineering principles to improved diagnosis and treatment of cardiovascular disease; her scholarship contributions to mentoring programs for women faculty in engineering; and her programmatics contributions to improving diversity in engineering. The Denice Denton Award is underwritten by Microsoft.
About the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology (ABI)
The Anita Borg Institute provides resources and programs to help industry, academia, and government recruit, retain, and develop women leaders in high-tech fields, resulting in higher levels of technological innovation. ABI programs serve high-tech women by creating a community and providing tools to help them develop their careers. ABI is a not-for-profit 501(c) 3 charitable organization. ABI Partners include: Google, Microsoft, HP, Sun Microsystems, Cisco, Intel, SAP, Juniper Networks, National Science Foundation, National Center for Women and Information Technology, IBM, Symantec, CA, NetApp, and Capgemini. For more information, visit www.anitaborg.org.
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