Women of Applied Mathematics: Research and Leadership

Suely Oliveira
Department of Computer Science
The University of Iowa
Iowa City, IA 52242-1419, USA.

I am a member of the Computer Science Department at the University of Iowa. Currently about 17% of our undergraduate students and 30% of our graduate students are female. We hope to increase these percentages with time. When I attended the WAMRL conference last Fall, I planned to invite female speakers to our Computer Science colloquia. This became very difficult with the hiring season. So instead, I decided to organize monthly meetings for our female students. We had our first lunch/meeting on April 5th. Only a small percentage of the students showed up. However, the ones who attended were very interested in seeing continuity of this effort. Since I am the only woman faculty at the moment in my Department, I also benefitted from the meeting. It is definitely helpful to have women getting together. I enjoyed the opportunity to go to the WAMRL meeting at University of Maryland last October. I learned a lot there, and I expect to pass some of my experiences as a student and as a faculty to the women that I am meeting now. Our next faculty lunch will be on May 5th, and we are already starting to plan events for the Summer and Fall.

Questions? tgkolda@sandia.gov or oleary@cs.umd.edu