ACM’s Special Interest Group on Software Engineering (SIGSOFT) has named Professor Barbara G. Ryder as the recipient of its 2015 Influential Educator Award “For significant contributions in software engineering education, graduate student and faculty mentoring and efforts to improve the representation of women.” Dr. Ryder is Head of the Department of Computer Science at Virginia Tech, where she holds the J. Byron Maupin Professorship in Engineering.
The award will be presented on 22 May 2015 at the 37th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2015) in Florence, Italy (http://2015.icse-conferences.org/). This award is presented annually to an educator who has made significant contributions to, and impact on, the field of software engineering with his/her accomplishments as a teacher, mentor, researcher (in education or learning), author, and/or policy maker. The award is accompanied by an honorarium and travel support to ICSE.
Professor Barbara G. Ryder has been deeply engaged in education and mentoring in software engineering and programming languages for more than 33 years. She is an exceptional graduate mentor having graduated 15 Ph.D. and 3 M.S. students and supervised 4 postdocs. She is an influential leader in diversity, both nationally through activities with CRA-W and NCWIT and through outreach at both Rutgers University and Virginia Tech. Dr. Ryder’s mentoring extends beyond her own research group. She was awarded Professor of the Year (2003) while at Rutgers, by the Computer Science Graduate Students Society award for excellence in teaching and was the recipient of the Rutgers University Graduate School Teaching Award (2007). As a department head at Virginia Tech, Dr. Ryder established an ongoing formal mentoring program for both assistant and associate professors. Dr. Ryder is an ACM Fellow (1998) and has received the Rutgers’ Presidential Award as a Leader in Diversity (2006) for her activities to increase the diversity of computing. Recently, she was given the 2014 Virginia AAUW Woman of Achievement Award in recognition of her efforts. She was a co-founder of the NCWIT VA/DC Aspirations Awards Affiliate, which celebrated its fourth year of awards in 2015. Read the full story here.
Please join the department in honoring Dr. Ryder’s accomplishment.
