Events

W-STEM: Mentoring Seminar by Dr. Selena Milanovic,  Strategy Consultant - Healthcare @ Siemens Advanta Consulting

Date & Time: Wednesday,  January 25, at 10:00 (PST) / 19:00 (CET)

Location: Zoom (Join us to get updates)

Biography

Selena is a biomedical engineer striving to improve global health, which is why already during her PhD at the University of Oxford she engaged with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the UK government. Her academic research focused on developing mathematical models of the brain to complement the information that imaging technology could not provide, ultimately shedding light on diseases such as dementia and stroke. During the early COVID-19 outbreak, Selena was one of the scientific advisors to British parliamentarians for the lockdown guidelines. As a young leader in healthcare, Selena represented European innovation on numerous occasions across the globe and received a Royal Family invite to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. As a recognition for her contribution to science and society, Selena was recently listed on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list.

W-STEM: Mentoring Seminar by Dr. Pooja Rani,  Postdoctoral Researcher @ the computer science department, the University of Zurich (UZH), Switzerland

Date & Time: Wednesday,  October 26, at 10:00 (PDT) / 19:00 (CEST)

Location: Zoom (Join us to get updates)

Biography

Pooja Rani is a postdoctoral researcher in the computer science department at the University of Zurich (UZH), Switzerland.  Before joining UZH, She was a postdoctoral researcher in computer science at the University of Bern. There, she also received her Ph.D.(with honors) in 2022 under the guidance of Prof. Oscar Nierstrasz. 

Her main research interest lies in the general area of Empirical Software Engineering (SE), sustainability in SE, Natural Language Processing (NLP), and machine learning applied to SE. Her current research focuses on understanding developer coding practices, identifying their information needs, and using that knowledge to build tools and techniques to assist developers in program comprehension and maintenance activities. Rani's work led to several published papers in major SE conferences (ICSE, SANER, SCAM) and journals (EMSE, JSS). She recently won the best research paper award in a conference for her work on automating code comment generation.

She also has an extensive experience in IT companies working in different profiles. She has worked as a software tester at Samsung Research Institute, as a researcher in VMware technologies, and as a software developer at People Interactive Ltd. She won the Employee of the year award for her excellent work at Samsung. 

W-STEM: Mentoring Seminar by Dr. Ismini Lourentzou, Assistant Professor of Computer Science @ Virginia Tech

Date & Time: Wednesday,  March 30, at 10:00 (PDT) / 19:00 (CEST)

Location: Zoom (Join us to get updates)

Biography

Ismini Lourentzou is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department at Virginia Tech. Her research interests target machine learning challenges related to data, e.g., learning with limited imperfect supervision, self-supervision, zero-shot learning, adversarial training, and multi-modal/cross-modal representation learning with applications to computer vision and natural language processing, e.g., video understanding, language grounding, (bio)medical imaging, etc. Her research is focused on building intelligent task assistants that augment human intelligence. Lourentzou’s work led to 5 granted patents and several published papers in major AI venues and journals (e.g., NeurIPS Datasets, Nature Scientific Data, MICCAI, ACM SIGIR, ACM CIKM, AAAI ICWSM, IEEE BigData, etc.). She has extensive prior experience in transdisciplinary research in areas ranging from health informatics and genomics to psychology and social computing. Lourentzou obtained her Ph.D. from the Computer Science Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana - Champaign. She was selected as a 2019 Rising Star in EECS, has received a Microsoft Azure Research Award and an IBM Invention Plateau.

W-STEM: Mentoring Seminar by Dr. Maryam Khanbaghi, Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering & Director of Power Systems and Sustainable Energy Graduate Program @ Santa Clara University

Date & Time: Wednesday,  February 23, at 10:00 (PST) / 19:00 (CET)

Location: Zoom (Join us to get updates)

Biography

Maryam Khanbaghi received her Bachelor’s degree from Universite de Nice-Sophia Antipolis, France, and M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from École Polytechnique, Montreal, Canada in Electrical Engineering. She worked several years for Pulp and Paper Research Institute of Canada in Montreal and Vancouver as a research engineer. She joined Corning Inc. in 2000. Maryam during her 15 years corporate career, worked in R&D centers, corporate engineering, manufacturing and commercial technology. She was named among 88 of the U.S.’s “Brightest and Inventive Young Engineers” participating in the National Academy of Engineers, 2005 at the U.S. Frontiers of Engineering Symposium. She is now assistant professor in electrical engineering department and director of Power Systems and Sustainable Energy at Santa Clara University. She has published over thirty papers in journals, conference proceedings and company internal research papers. She has two Patents. Her area of research is control system design/optimization for large systems such as power systems and manufacturing.

W-STEM: Mentoring Seminar on Academic Mobility by Dr. Anaïs Llorens, Assistant Project Scientist  @ Knight Lab, Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, University of California, Berkeley

Date & Time: Wednesday,  January 26, at 10:00 (PST) / 19:00 (CET)

Location: Zoom (Join us to get updates)

Biography

Anaïs Llorens is an Assistant Project Scientist in the Knight Lab at the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, at the University of California, Berkeley. She obtained a PhD in cognitive neuroscience at Aix-Marseille University in 2014 and, after a brief passage in Brisbane (Australia) as a visiting scholar, she did a first postdoc at Oslo University before joining the Knight Lab at University of California, Berkeley in 2019. Her research interest focuses on the cognitive models and brain mechanisms underlying working memory and language, using behavioral and electrophysiological (EEG and intraEEG) experiments conducted with healthy and pathologic populations. She is also actively engaged in promoting equity and diversity in STEM.

W-STEM: Mentoring Seminar by Dr. Elpiniki Apostolaki Iosifidou, Consultant @ Engie Impact

Date & Time: Wednesday,  December 1, at 10:00 (PST) / 19:00 (CET)

Location: Zoom (Join us to get updates)

Biography

Dr. Elpiniki Apostolaki Iosifidou is a consultant at Engie Impact since early 2020, focusing on sustainable transformation strategies for businesses, from electrification of logistics to energy supply decarbonization at site or portfolio level. Elpiniki has more than 8 years of industry and research experience in the fields of renewable energy, electric mobility, and sustainability.

Before joining Engie, she was a staff scientist at Grid Integration, Systems, and Mobility group of SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory at Stanford University. Prior to that, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the Transportation Sustainability Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley. In the past, she also worked with Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), and Twitter.

Elpiniki holds an MSc in Sustainable Energy Systems from the University of Edinburgh (UK), and a PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Delaware (U.S.). During her PhD, she conducted research on grid integration of electric vehicles and renewable energy.

Elpiniki has served as a committee member for standards developing associations and has been also leading and contributing to several publications and reports. Her research interests lie in the fields of electric vehicles, vehicle grid integration, renewable energy systems, energy storage, and sustainability.

W-STEM: Mentoring Seminar by Dr. Maria Kyrarini, Assistant Professor @ Santa Clara University, USA 

Date & Time: Wednesday, October 27, at 10:00 (PDT) / 19:00 (CEST)

Location: Zoom (Join us to get updates)

Biography

Maria Kyrarini is an Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and David Packard Jr. Faculty Fellow at Santa Clara University (SCU). Prior to SCU, she was a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Texas at Arlington under the advisement of Professor Dr. Fillia Makedon. She also served as the assistant director of the Heracleia Human-Centered Computing Lab. In 2019, Maria received her Ph.D. in Engineering from the University of Bremen under the supervision of Professor Dr.-Eng. Axel Gräser. The title of her Ph.D. thesis is: "Robot learning from human demonstrations for human-robot synergy". Before that, she received her M.Eng. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering and her M.Sc. degree in Automation Systems both from the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) in 2012 and 2014, respectively. Her primary research interests are in the fields of Robot Learning from Human Demonstrations, Human-Robot Interaction, and Assistive Robotics with a special focus on enhancing Human Performance.

W-STEM: Mentoring Seminar by Dr. Sanika Doolani, Product Designer @ Salesforce, USA 

Date & Time: Wednesday, September 29, at 10:00 (PDT) / 19:00 (CEST)

Location: Zoom 

Biography

Sanika Doolani (formerly Sanika Gupta) is a Product (UX) Designer at Salesforce, an American cloud-based software company headquartered in San Francisco, California.  In 2021, Sanika received her Ph.D. In Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Texas at Arlington (UTA) under the supervision of Prof. Fillia Makedon. Sanika won the Schuchman Outstanding Doctoral Candidate award for her Ph.D. Thesis, titled "VISTAS: Vocational Immersive Storytelling Training and Support Framework for Augmenting Work Performance". During her Ph.D., she interned at The Walt Disney Company (2019) and Sales-force (2020) as a User Experience (UX) designer. Before that, Sanika received her Bachelor of Computer Engineering degree from the University of Mumbai in 2014 and her Master of Science in Computer Science from UTA in 2016. 

Over the years, Sanika has published her work in several peer-reviewed journals and international conferences. Sanika has also won several awards, including the Verizon Outstanding Master's Thesis Award, the Outstanding Graduate Teaching Assistant Award, the Computer Science Engineering IAB Endowed Scholarship, the NSF-funded PETRA Conference Doctoral Consortium Award, among others. Sanika has been an advocate for women in computer science and she has participated in several events, such as the Grace Hopper Celebration and the UTA Student Computing Research Festival. Sanika's research interests revolve around Human-Computer Interaction, focusing on UX design, and designing for emerging technologies and new user interfaces.

W-CSE: Mentoring Seminar by Prof. Athina Tzovara, University of Bern, Switzerland 

Date & Time: Friday, February 19, at 11:00 (CDT) / 18:00 (CET)

Location: MS Teams 

Biography

Athina Tzovara is an assistant professor at the Institute of Computer Science at the University of Bern, Switzerland and a visiting scholar at the University of California Berkeley, USA. She received a diploma in electrical and computer engineering from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece, and a PhD in neuroscience from the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. She then joined the University of Zurich as a postdoctoral researcher and the University College London, UK as an honorary research associate. Her research uses modeling and machine learning techniques to study neural mechanisms that support human cognition.  

W-CSE: Mentoring Seminar by Prof. Temiloluwa Prioleau, Dartmouth College, USA

Date & Time: Friday, January 22, at 12:00 (CDT) / 19:00 (CET)

Location: MS Teams 

Biography

Temiloluwa Prioleau is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Dartmouth College. Her research interest is in the application of data science to human sensing and health. This includes developing and using mobile, wearable and digital solutions to understand, monitor, and affect bio-behavioral factors that influence health. She co-directs the Augmented Health Lab, the DartNets Lab and She is an affiliate of the Center for Technology and Behavioral Health (CTBH).

Before joining Dartmouth, she was a Rice Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in the Scalable Health Labs. She received her B.Sc. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from The University of Texas at Austin. Following that, she worked in industry for one year before pursuing an advanced degree. She obtained her M.S. & Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering, both from Georgia Institute of Technology.

W-CSE: Mentoring Seminar by Prof. Eirini-Eleni Tsiropoulou, University of New Mexico Albuquerque

Date & Time: Friday, October 30, at 12:00 (CDT) / 18:00 (CET)

Location: MS Teams

Biography

Eirini-Eleni Tsiropoulou is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of New Mexico. She obtained her Diploma in Electrical and Computer Engineering from National Technical University of Athens in 2008 and her MBA in techno-economics from the same institute in 2010. She graduated with a Ph.D in Electrical and Computer Engineering from National Technical University of Athens in 2014. Her main research interests lie in the area of cyber-physical social systems and wireless heterogeneous networks, with emphasis on network modeling and optimization, resource orchestration in interdependent systems, reinforcement learning, game theory, network economics, and Internet of Things. Four of her papers received the Best Paper Award at IEEE WCNC in 2012, ADHOCNETS in 2015, IEEE/IFIP WMNC 2019, and INFOCOM 2019 by the IEEE ComSoc Technical Committee on Communications Systems Integration and Modeling. Prof. Tsiropoulou was selected by the IEEE Communication Society - N2Women - as one of the top ten Rising Stars of 2017 in the communications and networking field. She received the NSF CRII Award in 2019, the Early Career Award by the IEEE Communications Society Internet Technical Committee in 2019 and the Junior Faculty Teaching Excellence Award, School of Engineering, University of New Mexico in 2018.

W-CSE: Mentoring Seminar by Prof. Melisa Orta Martinez,  Carnegie Mellon University 

Date & Time: Friday, September 25, at 11:00 (CDT) / 18:00 (CET)

Location: MS Teams 

Biography

Melisa Orta Martinez is an Assistant Professor in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University where she leads the Social Haptics Robotics and EDucation Laboratory (SHRED Lab). Outside of work she is a Muay Thai addict, training competitively, and loves her pets, husband, indian food, and bubble tea. She is originally from Mexico City where she studied Electronic Systems Engineering at the Tecnologico de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey. After completing her undergraduate studies she came to the US to pursue a Master's degree in Electrical Engineering at Stanford University following which she worked at Apple Inc. as a firmware engineer in the Human Input Devices group. She then returned to Stanford University to pursue a PhD in Mechanical Engineering at the Collaborative Haptics and Robotics in Medicine Laboratory (CHARM Lab). 

W-CSE: Mentoring Seminar - Get it Done! How to complete your Ph.D. by Dr. Maria Kyrarini 

Date & Time: Friday, December 11, at 11:00 (CDT) / 18:00 (CET)

Location: MS Teams 

Details of the seminar

In this mentoring seminar, we will discuss techniques that will help you to complete your Ph.D., including writing your thesis.  

W-CSE: Mentoring Seminar - How to prepare your application for an academic position by Dr. Maria Kyrarini 

Date & Time: Friday, October 16, at 11:00 (CDT) / 18:00 (CET)

Location: MS Teams 

Details of the seminar

In this mentoring seminar, we will discuss how to prepare your application for an academic position. We will discuss how to prepare the cover letter, CV, teaching, research, and diversity statements.