COLLEGE STATION, TX–(Marketwired – February 26, 2014) – The Center for Minorities and People with Disabilities in IT (CMD-IT), which develops national-scale projects to ensure that underrepresented groups are fully engaged in computing and information technologies, announced today that Dr. Jan Cuny is the recipient of the 2014 Richard Tapia Achievement Award. Dr. Cuny was presented with the award on Friday, February 7, 2014 at the 2014 Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing Conference in Seattle, WA. The Tapia Conference, which is one of the most diverse technical conferences in computing, brings together undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, researchers, and professionals to highlight the technical achievements and diversity that exists in the computing field.
Dr. Cuny was awarded the 2014 Richard Tapia Achievement Award for her dedication and lifelong work making computing more inclusive to underrepresented and underserved communities. Since 2004, Jan Cuny has been the Program Officer for the CISE Broadening Participation in Computing (BPC) program at the National Science Foundation.
Before coming to NSF, Jan was a faculty member in the Computer Science departments at Purdue University, the University of Massachusetts, and the University of Oregon. Her research centered on programming environments for computational science.
At NSF, Dr. Cuny founded the BPC program. It aims to significantly increase the number of students getting postsecondary degrees in computing, with an initial emphasis on those groups — women, minorities, and persons with disabilities — who have traditionally been underrepresented in computing. BPC supports efforts from middle school through graduate school and the early faculty ranks. It currently has a portfolio of over $50 million in active awards. More importantly, it has built a national community of several hundred researchers and practitioners who actively collaborate on interventions that address underrepresentation.
Dr. Cuny has been involved in efforts to increase the participation of women in computing research for many years. She was a long time member of the Computing Research Association’s Committee on the Status of Women (CRA-W), serving among other activities as a CRA-W co-chair, a mentor in their Distributed Mentoring Program, and a lead on their Academic Career Mentoring Workshop, Grad Cohort, and Cohort for Associated Professors projects. Jan was also a member of the Advisory Board for Anita Borg Institute for Woman and Technology, the Leadership team of the National Center for Women in Technology, the Executive Committee of the Coalition to Diversify Computing, and the Board of Directors of the Computing Research Association. She was Program Chair of the 2004 Grace Hopper Conference and the General Chair of the 2006 conference. For her efforts with underserved populations, she is a recipient of one of the 2006 ACM President’s Awards and the 2007 CRA A. Nico Habermann Award.
About the Tapia Conference
The Tapia Conferences are organized by the Coalition to Diversify Computing (CDC), sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and presented by the Center for Minorities and People with Disabilities in Information Technology (CMD-IT). The conferences are in-cooperation with the Computing Research Association (CRA) and the IEEE Computer Society (IEEE-CS). For more information about the ACM Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing Conference visit http://tapiaconference.org/.
About the Center for Minorities and People with Disabilities in Information Technology (CMD-IT)
The vision of CMD-IT is to contribute to the national need for an effective workforce in computing and IT through inclusive programs and initiatives focused on minorities and people with disabilities. CMDIT’s vision is accomplished through its mission to insure that underrepresented groups are fully engaged in computing and IT and to promote innovation that enriches, enhances and enables underrepresented communities. For more information please visit www.cmd-it.org.
Contact:
Valerie Taylor
Executive Director
979-845-2497
Email contact
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