The Artemis Project, the departmental outreach program led by Amy Greenwald, recently received $15,000 from Microsoft Research and The National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT) via the NCWIT Academic Alliance Seed Fund.
Artemis is a five-week summer day camp for high school girls in the Providence area that provides an introduction to computer science and technology. The learning process includes a range of both educational and confidence-building activities. Participants attend lectures from women scientists and other potential role models from both academia and industry. Artemis is provided at no cost to the participants, who come from predominately low-income, minority households.
The award will be used to expand Artemis into new directions. This year, in addition to the four coordinators from Brown, (Michelle Micallef, Natalie Serrino, Miranda Steele and Tashyana Thompson) a Boston University student (Katherine Zhao) has also been hired with hopes of expanding the program to the greater Boston area in future years.
The NCWIT Academic Alliance Seed Fund provides U.S. academic institutions with start-up funds to develop and implement initiatives for recruiting and retaining women in computer science and information technology fields of study. The Seed Fund was initiated in 2007 with start-up funding from Microsoft Research and to-date has awarded $265,450 in funding. University at Albany SUNY and Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University also received awards from the NCWIT Academic Alliance in this round of funding.
NCWIT is a national coalition of over 170 prominent corporations, academic institutions, government agencies, and non-profits working to strengthen the computing workforce and cultivate technology innovation by increasing the participation of women. NCWIT’s work connects efforts to increase women’s participation in technology along the entire pipeline, from K-12 and higher education through industry, academic, and entrepreneurial careers.
The NCWIT Academic Alliance brings together more than 90 representatives from computer science and IT departments at colleges and universities across the country – spanning research universities, community colleges, women’s colleges, and minority-serving institutions – to work towards gender equity, diversity, and institutional change in computing higher education.
