On Tuesday, April 14, attendees gathered at the Glass Pavilion on the Homewood campus to honor and highlight the work of women in the rapidly growing field of artificial intelligence.
The third annual Celebrating Women in Data Science and AI Symposium, sponsored by the Data Science and AI Institute, NSF NRT: AI-Driven Advances in Microelectronics, and the Institute for Data-Intensive Engineering and Science (IDIES), drew a record number of attendees for a full day of speakers, panel discussions, poster presentations, and networking focused on the contributions and future of women working with AI.
Paulette Clancy, Edward J. Schaefer Professor in Engineering in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and research director of discovery and inquiry at the Data Science and AI Institute, served as emcee and moderated both the morning and afternoon panels.
The morning panel, “Experiences of Women in AI,” featured Avanti Athreya of the Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics, Zih-Yun “Sarah” Chiu of the Department of Computer Science, Suchi Saria of the Department of Computer Science, Laixi Shi of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Mateo Díaz of the Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics.
The afternoon panel, “Making the Transition from Academia to Industry,” highlighted the career paths of several industry leaders, including Sai Pooja Mahajan, principal scientist at Genentech, and former Johns Hopkins postdoctoral fellow; and Aude Oliva, professor and director of the MIT-IBM Watson Lab, director of strategic industry engagement at the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, and senior research scientist at CSAIL; and Louise Sengupta, director of business development at Northrop Grumman Corp.
Oliva also delivered a featured talk earlier in the day. The keynote address was given by Louise Sengupta, a microelectronics expert and director of business development at Northrop Grumman Corp.
Event organizers Jessica Strongin and Paulette Clancy noted the continued growth of the symposium and expressed enthusiasm for expanding next year’s event to accommodate rising interest in advancing equity and representation for women in AI. “Jess and I were thrilled to see every seat taken in the Glass Pavilion,” Clancy said, “and to hear how attendees were taking new ideas back to their labs for their AI-related work. We were able to help participants network with new acquaintances, and we were heartened by the nearly one-third attendance of our male allies.”
2026 Best Poster Awards
Shiye “Sally” Cao, Department of Computer Science
Advisors: Chien-Ming Huang and Anqi Liu, “Long-Term In-Home Robotic Support for Children”
Hannah Gonzalez Collison, Department of Computer Science
Advisors: Benjamin Van Durme and Daniel Khashabi, “Characterizing Relative Impact of Scholarly Publications”
Barbara Fiedorowicz, Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics
Advisor: Amitabh Basu, “Identifying Faulty Edges in Resistive Electrical Networks”
Zhenan Shao, Department of Cognitive Science and Computational Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory
Advisor: Diane Beck (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign), “Probing Human Visual Robustness with Neurally-Guided Deep Convolutional Neural Networks”
2026 People’s Choice Award
Yi Cao, Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering
Advisor: Paulette Clancy, “Migration as a Probe: A Generalizable Benchmark Framework for Specialist vs. Generalist Machine-Learned Force Fields”
