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Our

Mission

Women in Computer Architecture (WICARCH) is designed to create a community for women studying and working in the field of computer architecture. Our goal is to promote women in computer architecture and increase visibility for their research and development contributions. We welcome participation from all women including students, post docs, industry researchers and developers and faculty members. To be listed in our directory, please click here.

Profiles of WICArch

The mission of this section is to profile women in computer architecture across many walks of our field, from [junior, senior] x [industry, academia].

If you would like to be profiled, would like to nominate someone to be profiled, or would like to write a profile, please let us know by wicarch-chair@acm.org

Mengjia Yan

by Lisa Hsu on February 5, 2020

Dr. Mengjia Yan is undoubtedly one of the most delightful people you will ever meet – smart, positive, exceedingly wise beyond her years, and the kind of person who can turn a frown upside down.  She was paired with me as a mentee at ISCA 2018, but I genuinely think that it is I who have benefited from the relationship.  These days, she is a new assistant professor at MIT, having recently completed her PhD at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2019.

Read more...

WICArch Directory

We actively maintain a list of women working in the field of computer architecture.  The goal of this list is many-fold.  First, the list services as a resource for program chairs and conference organizers to identify women to serve in key technical roles such as keynote, panels and program committees.  Second, the list is designed to foster community and help women connect with other women in computer architecture.  This list can be used by current and potential graduate students to find advisors and mentors. Four profiles, selected randomly, are shown below.  We encourage you to browse the full directory.

Placeholder. No Picture provided by Charu

Charu

PhD Candidate
Northeastern University
Personal URL

Research Statement

Charu Kalra is a PhD student in the Computer Engineering Department at Northeastern University. She is part of the Northeastern University Computer Architecture Research (NUCAR) group under the direction of Prof. David Kaeli. Her research interests include GPU compilers, software reliability, machine learning, workload characterization, and performance evaluation of GPU systems. Her PhD thesis focuses on design and evaluation of compiler-based techniques to predict and improve reliability of GPU applications. In 2014, Charu was featured on NVIDIA's 'Women Who CUDA' list. She has also pursued internships at AMD and AMD Research in the past.

Interests

Accelerator-Based, Application-Specific and Reconfigurable Architecture, Dependable Architecture, Instruction, Thread and Data-Level Parallelism
Picture of Xiaochen Guo

Xiaochen Guo

Assistant Professor
Lehigh University
Personal URL

Research Statement

Dr. Guo is an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Lehigh University. Dr. Guo received her Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Rochester in 2015, and B.S. degree from Beihang University in 2009. Dr. Guo's research interests are in the broad area of computer architecture, with an emphasis on leveraging emerging technologies to build energy-efficient architectures. She received the IBM Ph.D. Fellowship twice. Dr. Guo is a recipient of the National Science Foundation CAREER Award and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Computing Sciences Research Pathways Fellowship.

Interests

Architectural Support For Programming Languages Or Software Development, Architecture For Emerging Technologies and Applications, Processor, Memory, and Storage Systems Architecture
Picture of Bahar Asgari

Bahar Asgari

Assistant Professor
University of Maryland, College Park
Personal URL

Research Statement

Bahar Asgari is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Maryland, Collage Park with a joint appointment in UMIACS. Before joining UMD in August 2022, she spent a year working at Google on its Systems and Services Infrastructure team. She received her Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering from Georgia Tech in 2021, where she was advised by Dr. Sudhakar Yalamanchili and Dr. Hyesoon Kim. Bahar’s research interests include but are not limited to domain-specific architecture design, near memory processing, and reconfigurable computing. Her proposed low-cost hardware accelerators and hardware/software co-optimization that deal with essential challenges of sparse problems contribute to a widespread application domain from machine learning to scientific computing.

Interests

Accelerator-Based, Application-Specific and Reconfigurable Architecture
Picture of Esha Choukse

Esha Choukse

Researcher
Microsoft Research
Personal URL

Research Statement

Interests

Architectural Support For Security Or Virtualization, Evaluation and Measurement Of Real Systems, Processor, Memory, and Storage Systems Architecture

Full Directory // List Yourself // Update Profile

We regularly organize a social gathering of women at the start of major architecture conferences (ISCA, HPCA, ASPLOS and MICRO).  These meet ups help newcomers to our conferences become better integrated in the community and reduce some of the pressure and intimidation they might feel at their first conference.  They provide great networking opportunities.  We hope to see you at the next one!
Would you like to attend a SIGARCH-sponsored event, but cannot because the cost of child-care is prohibitive? SIGARCH provides funds for a limited number of grants that support child care for members that would like to participate in a SIGARCH-sponsored event but are unable to do so without this support. SIGARCH provides financial assistance to subsidize a variety of child-care options. View details here.
Annually, we provide a brochure of upcoming female graduates in computer architecture. The goal of this brochure is to bring greater visibility to women on the job market and to celebrate their success as PhD students.

2018-2019 Candidates
2019 Candidates

Check out our WICARCH YouTube channel which features recorded technical talks by members of the WICARCH community.

Initiatives

We organize various initiatives to better connect women in computer architecture.

Join Our Mailing List

Our mailing list is maintained through ACM.  You can join in 3 easy steps:

1. Join SIGARCH/SIGMICRO (you don’t need to be a full ACM member — you can join a SIG only which is pretty cheap!)

SIGARCH   |   SIGMICRO

2. Update your gender in your myACM account (create/activate account as needed)

Student members: if you log into myACM, you should see a “My Student Profile” on the left menu.  This is where you can specify gender.
Professional members: if you log into myACM, you should see a “My Professional and Technical Interest Profile” on the left menu you.  This is where you can specify gender.
3. Accept to receive emails from ACM:
In myACM, under “My Contact Information”, “Email Policy”, “Current preference” should have the box “Please send me ACM Announcements via email” checked.

Join Our Slack Channel

We offer an informal mentoring program through our slack channel (wicarch.slack.com).  Women at all career stages are encouraged to join.  The mentoring program provides an easy way to connect with other women and receive advice on a wide range of career and personal issues.

If you need assistance in joining our mailing list or slack channel, please send email to wicarch-chair@acm.org.

This website serves women in the field of computer architecture.
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