My second Finding Ada post highlights a peer of mine, Valerie E. Taylor. She was a couple of years ahead of me in the grad program at UC Berkeley. Valerie and a few other graduate students provided the peer mentoring foundation that helped a fairly significant cohort of African-American students to complete their dissertations in EECS. Many of them are still making major research contributions in EECS. From the mid-80’s to mid-90’s, there was a really vibrant community of African-American students in Berkeley EECS, due in large part to Valerie’s efforts to recruit and retain students.
Here’s a fairly recent bio:
Valerie E. Taylor earned her B.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering and M.S. in Computer Engineering from Purdue University in1985 and 1986, respectively, and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1991. From 1991-2002, Dr. Taylor was a member of the faculty in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Northwestern University. Dr. Taylor joined the faculty at Texas A&M University as Head of the Dwight Look College of Engineering’s Department of Computer Science in January of 2003, and is, also currently a holder of the Royce E. Wisenbaker Professorship II. Her research interests are in the area of high performance computing, with particular emphasis on the performance of parallel and distributed applications and mesh partitioning for distributed systems. She has authored or co-authored over 90 papers in these areas. Dr. Taylor has received numerous awards for distinguished research and leadership, including the 2002 IEEE Harriet B. Rigas Award for woman with significant contributions in engineering education, the 2002 Outstanding Young Engineering Alumni from the University of California at Berkeley, the 2002 Nico Habermann Award for increasing the diversity in computing, and the 2005 Tapia Achievement Award for Scientific Scholarship, Civic Science, and Diversifying Computing. Dr. Taylor is a member of ACM and Senior Member of IEEE-CS.
We also overlapped as faculty members at Northwestern University. Valerie was part of the reason I went there. She moved up, becoming one of the few female, African-American heads of a major research oriented Computer Science department. Frankly, I’m mostly hedging on that. Odd’s on she’s probably singularly in that category and she’s been making it work for 6 years now. Has it been that long?
I moved on from Northwestern, but if I’d listened to Valerie a little more closely I might have thrived there. Such is life.