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

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.
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.

Reetuparna Das
Assistant Professor
University of Michigan
(No URL)
Reetu Das is an Assistant Professor at University of Michigan. Prior to this, she was a research scientist at Intel Labs, and the researcher-in-residence for the Center for Future Architectures Research. She received her PhD in Computer Science and Engineering from Pennsylvania State University, University Park. Some of her recent projects include in-memory architectures, fine-grain heterogeneous core architectures for mobile systems, and low-power scalable interconnects for kilo-core processors. Her research program has been funded by National Science Foundation, the Center for Future Architectures Research (C-FAR), Semiconductor Research Corporation and Intel Corporation. Reetu is an expert in computer architecture. She has authored over 45 papers, filed 7 patents and served on over 20 technical program committees. She has served as a track chair for Design Automation Conference for two consecutive years. Her research has been recognized by several awards. She has received outstanding research and teaching assistantship awards at Pennsylvania State University, an IEEE Top Picks award, an NSF CAREER award, CRA-W Borg Early Career Award, IEEE/ACM MICRO Hall of Fame award and was recently inducted to ISCA Hall of Fame. Her recent work on in-memory design named Compute Caches received the best Demo award in C-FAR and was selected from 50 projects from leading University research groups. She also serves as the CEO of a precision medicine start-up, Sequal Inc.
Accelerator-Based, Application-Specific and Reconfigurable Architecture, Architectural Support For Security Or Virtualization, Architecture For Emerging Technologies and Applications, Effects Of Circuits Or Technology On Architecture, Interconnection Network, Router and Network Interface Architecture, Iot, Mobile and Embedded Architecture, Processor, Memory, and Storage Systems Architecture
Karin Strauss
Senior Principal Researcher Manager
Microsoft Research
Personal URL
Karin Strauss is a senior principal research manager at Microsoft (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research) and an affiliate full professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (http://www.cs.washington.edu/) at University of Washington (http://www.washington.edu/). Her research lies at the intersection of computer architecture, systems, and biology. Her work includes hardware accelerators for machine learning, emerging memory technologies, and the use of biotechnology to the benefit of the IT industry. Lately, her focus has been on creating an end-to-end system that stores digital data in synthetic DNA, for which she was named one of the 2016 “100 Most Creative People in Business” by Fast Company. Along with Luis Ceze, she has recently received the ACM SIGARCH Maurice Wilkes Award for their work on DNA data storage. The DNA data storage project has also been chosen as “Best of What’s New” by Popular Science in 2016, one of the "Top 10 Emerging Technologies" by the World Economic Forum in 2019, and highlighted by influential publications such as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, MIT Technology Review, and Scientific American. Karin received her PhD in Computer Science from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2007.
Architectural Support For Programming Languages Or Software Development, Architecture For Emerging Technologies and Applications, Datacenter-Scale Computing, Effects Of Circuits Or Technology On Architecture, Processor, Memory, and Storage Systems Architecture
Angeles G. Navarro
Professor
University of Malaga
(No URL)
Angeles G. Navarro received her PhD in Computer Science from the University of Malaga (Spain) in 2000. She is a Professor in the Department of Computer Architecture at the University of Malaga. She has been a Research Visiting Scholar in the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Technical University of Munich, the EPCC at the University of Edinburgh, the University of Bristol, and a Research Visitor in IBM T.J. Watson Research Center at New York and in Cray Inc at Seattle. She is the author or co-author of more than 80 papers and has served as a program committee member for several High Performance Computing related conferences. Her research interests are in parallel programming models and compilation techniques for heterogeneous and reconfigurable architectures.
Dr. Navarro has been involved in many initiatives to promote women in Computer Science. She is the co-founder of WSARTECO (Women in SARTECO), a community that is part of the Spanish Computer Architecture Scientific Society, which encourages junior and senior women working in the area to increase visibility and to develop a supporting network.
Accelerator-Based, Application-Specific and Reconfigurable Architecture, Architectural Support For Programming Languages Or Software Development
Amna Shahab
PhD Student
The University of Edinburgh
Personal URL
Amna Shahab attended The University of Edinburgh for her doctoral studies and was advised by Boris Grot. Her research interests broadly lie in computer architecture and more specifically on memory system design for emerging datacenter workloads. She also has a passion for teaching and hopes to learn how to effectively translate it into a passion for learning from students.
Architecture For Emerging Technologies and Applications, Datacenter-Scale Computing, Effects Of Circuits Or Technology On Architecture, Processor, Memory, and Storage Systems ArchitectureInitiatives
We organize various initiatives to better connect women in computer architecture.
Join Our Mailing List
2. Update your gender in your myACM account (create/activate account as needed)
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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