Dr. Tiffani L. Williams, associate professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Texas A&M University, is a general co-chair for this year's Grace Hopper Conference and has also been selected as a Texas A&M ADVANCE Scholar.
The Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing is the world's largest gathering of women technologists. It is produced by the Anita Borg Institute and presented in partnership with the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). This year’s conference marks 25 years. Grace Hopper has significantly grown in size since its inception. This year, the number of attendees is expected to reach 8,000. The conference is a testament of great strides women have made in technology.
This year will be the very first year that one of the keynote speakers will be a male. A few featured speakers for this year’s conference are Shafi Goldwasser, professor of computer science and engineering at MIT and 2012 Turing Award recipient, Maria Klawe, president of Harvey Mudd College, Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft and Arati Prabhakar, director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
The Department of Computer Science and Engineering has taken a large group of students and faculty to GHC every year for many years and it is a major focus of each fall semester. The CSE student organization, Aggie Women in Computer Science (AWICS), organizes the department’s participation at GHC.
The Texas A&M ADVANCE Scholar Program is a mentoring program that matches women of color who work in the fields of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) with an internal advocate and an eminent scholar in their field. Their mission is to transform Texas A&M by enhancing and sustaining gender equality and improving representation of women faculty in STEM fields. The program is one of the many activities of Texas A&M’s NSF funding ADVANCE Center.
During the 2004-2005 academic year, Williams was the Edward, Frances, and Shirley B. Daniels Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study at Harvard University. She earned her bachelor's degree in computer science from Marquette University and Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Central Florida. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of New Mexico. Her honors include a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship, an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship, and a McKnight Doctoral Fellowship. Her research interests are in the areas of bioinformatics and high-performance computing.