Women in Theory Workshop 2018

Harvard University, Cambridge MA

Investigators

Abstract

This award supports the 6th Biennial Women-in-Theory Workshop at Harvard University in June 2018. The intended audience of the workshop is graduate students in the field of theoretical computer science (TCS). Motivated by the low overall number of female faculty members, researchers, and students in TCS world wide, the workshop has two goals. The first is to deliver an invigorating educational program to the student participants by inviting leading female researchers to present tutorials of their research topics. The second is to provide an outstanding opportunity to bring together women students from different institutions across the country and internationally, so as to foster a sense of kinship and camaraderie, and to provide access to role models in this area by having senior and junior faculty members and industrial researchers present. The format of this workshop consists of technical tutorials, a non-technical talk, a student rump session, and a panel discussion, following the model of the first five workshops in this series. The first five Women-in-Theory workshops were greeted with great enthusiasm both from the participants and from the TCS research community at large. Since the first workshop in 2008, the organizers have received overwhelmingly positive feedback and many participants have matured to be successful researchers. These serve as testimonials that the workshop is accomplishing its primary goal of helping women become more successful in TCS. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.