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.

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.

Picture of Reetuparna Das

Reetuparna Das

Assistant Professor
University of Michigan
(No URL)

Research Statement

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.

Interests

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
Placeholder. No Picture provided by Karin Strauss

Karin Strauss

Senior Principal Researcher Manager
Microsoft Research
Personal URL

Research Statement

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.

Interests

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
Picture of Angeles G. Navarro

Angeles G. Navarro

Professor
University of Malaga
(No URL)

Research Statement

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.

Interests

Accelerator-Based, Application-Specific and Reconfigurable Architecture, Architectural Support For Programming Languages Or Software Development
Picture of Amna Shahab

Amna Shahab

PhD Student
The University of Edinburgh
Personal URL

Research Statement

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.

Interests

Architecture For Emerging Technologies and Applications, Datacenter-Scale Computing, Effects Of Circuits Or Technology On Architecture, Processor, Memory, and Storage Systems Architecture
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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