Student honored for leadership to promote women in computing

Katie Moor Siek has put in overtime to strengthen the education of women in computing sciences ever since she began her graduate work in the Department of Computer Science at the Indiana University School of Informatics.

And Siek’s hard work has been recognized by the Women in Computing at IU (WIC@IU), which has presented her with its first “Woman of the Year” Award.  

Siek, who will receive her doctorate in computer science at the May 6 IU commencement, has been a dominant and driving force in promoting WIC@IU programs and activities such as Just Be, job fairs, on-campus seminars, and state, national and international conferences. She’s held several leadership positions with WIC@IU and the Computer Science Graduate Student Association at IU, including serving as president of both organizations.

“Katie is an exceptional student who combines excellence in scholarship with a passion for helping her community,” says assistant professor Kay Connelly, who has served as Siek’s mentor. “We've been extremely lucky that she has directed her tremendous energy towards building WIC@IU these past three years.”

Siek’s research interests include human-computer interaction, ubiquitous computing, health informatics and performance support systems.

During her six years of study at IU, Siek has served a fellowship with the National Science Physical Consortium and stipend support from Sandia National Laboratories.

The New York State native earned her master’s in computer science at IU in 2004 and immediately began her doctorate studies. Siek completed her undergraduate work at Eckerd College, St. Petersburg, Fla., where she started on the women’s basketball team and was named the Sunshine State Conference Women's Scholar Athlete of the Year in 1998-99.

Siek’s husband, Jeremy Siek, also earned his doctorate in computer science at IU.

Computer science is the study of computers, including both hardware and software design. Students of computer science learn to design and implement systems to manage and visualize data, control robots, model human cognition, extract information from vast volumes of data, and build the tools used by other information technology professionals.

More information about the School of Informatics’ Department of Computer Science at IU-Bloomington can be found at www.cs.indiana.edu.