108 ICS students, 7 faculty and staff to attend 2020 Virtual Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing Conference

Female students attend on BRAID Initiative funding award.

Thanks to an award from the BRAID (Building Recruiting And Inclusion for Diversity) Initiative, which aims to increase the percentage of women and students of color in computer science, the UC Irvine Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS) will be sending 108 of its female undergraduate and graduate students to the 2020 Virtual Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing (GHC).

“GHC will be a great venue for our ICS women to network, collaborate and find mentors among an inspiring community of women technologists from around the world,” said Sharnnia Artis, assistant dean of access and inclusion. “This is an especially important opportunity for the freshman and first-year transfer students we are sending.”

The GHC 2020 virtual conference will be held on Sept. 29-Oct. 3 and is produced by the Anita Borg Institute for Women in Technology and presented in partnership with the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). GHC is considered the world’s largest gathering of women technologists with more than 30,000 registered attendees.

In addition to the 108 ICS students, UCI will be sending 7 staff and faculty members who are dedicated to closing the gender gap in information and computer sciences, including Sharnnia Artis, assistant dean of access and inclusion; Kris Bolcer, ICS director of student affairs; Gregory Diggs-Yang, assistance director of access and inclusion; Jessica Shanahan, program manager of Master of Computer Science; Connie Cheng, program director of Master of Software Engineering; Jennifer Wong-Ma, associate professor of teaching; and Debra Richardson, ICS founding dean.

Richardson said, “Attendance at GHC has been demonstrated to increase women’s success and persistence in computing, a field that has a shortage of women in the workforce. We hope that with continued support from the BRAID Initiative and other organizations we can continue to provide these important professional development opportunities for our ICS students.”

Congratulations to the following 108 ICS students who will be attending GHC 2020:

The BRAID initiative launched in September 2014 in partnership with universities across the nation to increase the percentage of women and students of color majoring in computer science. Each university committed to a set of approaches to increase diversity within their computer science departments. Each department also committed to providing data for a research study that will document the progress made over the course of three years. UC Irvine is one of only 15 Building Recruiting And Inclusion for Diversity Initiative institutions to proudly receive BRAID funding and the only school from the University of California family to be BRAID affiliated.