Let’s start with a big thank you to all who supported our first ever online fundraiser. We reached our goal of $15,000 -- within a hair’s breadth. More importantly, we heard from students, faculty, alumni, our Board Members, and new friends. Thank you all! We would also like to publicly thank Durriyyah Jackson for her tremendous help in generating the idea, implementing it and making sure it was featured near and far. 

This past month, we were fortunate to host Dr. Lorrie Faith Cranor, professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, for a talk entitled "Who Says Engineering Isn’t Creative?"

Professor Cranor, who took one sabbatical in the CMU School of Art (now that’s also a creative move!), talked about her projects that combine concepts and tools of computing and mathematics and her penchant for quilting. To (mis)quote long-ago advertisements "this is not your mother’s quilting." Professor Cranor, who is also the director of the CyLab Usable Privacy and Security Laboratory, uses algorithms and tessellations to generate patterns, which she turns into quilts and quilt hangings. Perhaps her most creative endeavor is finding more than 24 hours in a day to do all she does.

We are set to introduce a new feature on our website: Conversations With SEAS Faculty. In each conversation, we ask a current student to interview one of our many female faculty members. In our first interview, our Board Member and graduate student Mojolaoluwa Ladipo-Obasa (aka Demi) interviewed Professor Anne-Laure Papa. Here is a taste of the interview. “Professor Papa joined SEAS after seven years of collaborative and in-depth post-doc programs at Boston. She was excited about the collaborative nature of research at GWU, particularly with GWU hospital. The campus and facilities were also attractive. Her focus is in cancer research, where she develops diagnostic and therapeutic tools based on an integration of cellular components and nanotechnology, for cancer and thrombosis. Specifically, she studies metastatic cancer – cancer cells that escape from primary tumors into the bloodstream and find a new location to disseminate. Her research develops tools to intercept such cancer cells when they are susceptible in the blood stream.” 

Closing this section, and the newsletter itself, is very bitter-sweet. You have all come to know our associate director, Taly Walsh, either through her front-line work on our advisory boards, her outreach to our mentors and mentees, and her emails promoting our webinars. Taly also works behind-the-scenes on the newsletter, the website, artwork and communications, and has been the source of many of our new ideas. Taly has decided that she is ready to retire and will be leaving us in the near future. I cannot yet imagine how the Center will be without her. Taly! Enjoy every moment of the new phase of your life.

Our next edition will be in January of the new year. Our best wishes for a safe and enjoyable Holiday Season.

Dr. Shelly Heller
WiE Center Director

It might be snowing during our next webinar, but it's not too soon for students to think about Summer plans!

On December 7 at noon, we were fortunate to hear from: