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October 20, 2006 Vol. 77,
no. 10F
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| SYSTERS IN CS: EECS
doctoral students Juliet Holwill (left) and Hayley Iben recently
attended the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. RACHEL
SHAFER PHOTO
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EECS students
find inspiration and camaraderie at conference for women
At most research conferences she goes to, EECS Ph.D.
student Hayley Iben is one of seven women among 100 computer scientists
attending. But at the Grace Murray Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing,
she finds fellowship with hundreds of other women just like her. The
goal of the 1,300-person conference is to spotlight the accomplishments
and careers of women in computing and to bring them together for four
days of sessions, research presentations and networking.
Seventeen Berkeley women attended the conference this year, which took
place October 4–7 in San Diego. The attendees, who took in sessions
from mentoring to becoming a CEO (moderated by Dean Newton), were EECS
graduate students, Iben, Elaine Cheong, Barbara Engelhardt, Bonnie
Kirkpatrick, Anupama Bowander, Zhe Daisy Wang, Juliet Holwill, Sarah
Bergbreiter, Sharena Paripatyadar, Maryam Vareth, Samantha Riesenfeld,
Cindy Song and Amy Wu, and undergraduates Cho Mon Kyaw, June Andrews,
Maryam Shahbazi and Meg Viswanath.
“
For such a big department, there aren’t that many women in computer
science at Berkeley,” Iben says. “At this conference, I
can meet a lot of people and make friends and connections. Some of
these women might be my future colleagues.”
“
It’s really helpful to be around so many successful women,” adds
Juliet Holwill, current co-president of Berkeley’s Women in
Computer Science and Engineering (WiCSE). “It boosts your confidence.”
Several of the sessions were dedicated to confidence building. Presenters
talked about the need for women to be more assertive, from speaking
up in meetings to protecting their ideas from coworkers who try to
claim them as their own. “I think women are more modest than
men about their accomplishments,” Iben says. “So we learn
that it’s important to toot our horn.”
Iben has much to be proud of. A member of the Berkeley Computer Animation
and Modeling Group under EECS associate professor James O’Brien,
she was invited to present a paper at the conference on her research
in computer graphics. Iben’s work focuses on creating software
that uses equations from fracture mechanics to generate realistic cracking
on surfaces. So computer-generated dried-out mud, for example, looks
like actual dried-out mud.
It’s not the first time Iben has presented her research; she
recently won an honorable mention in the Best Paper Award category
at the 2006 ACM SIGGRAPH/Eurographics Symposium on Computer Animation.
She’s also president of Berkeley’s Computer Science Graduate
Student Association. She won a coveted part-time job at Pixar, where
she works in the company’s research group and was a finalist
for the Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship.
The attendees say they appreciated the opportunity to frankly discuss
gender dynamics in academia and the workplace. “I also really
liked the emphasis that was placed on being well-educated and getting
your Ph.D.,” Holwill says. “They reminded us that we don’t
have to be in a set track. We have lots of options.”
For more information, go to http://gracehopper.org.
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