2023 NAE Meeting

One of the new members they will welcome

Telle Whitney has just been selected to be a new member of the National Academy of Engineering. I will see her at the next 2023 National Academy of Engineering’s annual meeting—where she will be admitted to the NAE.

Congrats to Telle on being selected to the join the NAE this year.

Some of Her Story

People are selected to join the NAE for various reasons. Whitney was selected for her work on organizing things that have helped celebrate women’s roles in all aspects of computer science.

She worked closely with Anita Borg on many activities. They co-founded the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing in 1994. Ken and I remember when STOC 1989 planned an all-female program committee (ultimately 10 female, 2 male), but Borg and Whitney planned an entire computing conference for women. They had no set idea of how to create a conference, nor any preconceived technological theme. What they organized drew over 450 women in its first year. They repeated it every third year, then every second year, then annually. GHC 23 will take place in two weeks in “Orlando + Virtual” and expects 30,000 attendees.

Borg founded the Institute for Women and Technology in 1997 with backing from Xerox PARC, where she had just moved from DEC. She was soon joined by Whitney, who served as CEO and President until 2017. The institute was renamed for Borg following her tragic passing from cancer in 2003. Not to outdo herself, Whitney in 2004 also co-founded the National Center for Women and Information Technology (NCWIT), which is headquartered at the University of Colorado in Boulder.

Before then, and after her 1985 PhD from Caltech, Whitney worked on both the hardware and software ends of the computer chip industry in Silicon Valley. She held senior technical management positions at Actel and Malleable Technologies and high roles in several startup companies. She has honorary doctorates from CMU and from the Claremont Graduate University, which will observe its centenary in 2025.

Open Problems

I look forward to seeing Whitney at the meeting. I hope that she is interested to playing a role in the NAE, since it is clear that she is terrific at organizing such activities.