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CAPP-L 2008 Workshop

CAPP-L
Advanced Career Mentoring Workshop for Women in Research Labs


November 14 & 15, 2008
Inn at Loretto in Santa Fe, New Mexico
Part of the CAPP Workshop.

Goal.
The goal of the CAPP-L workshop is help mid-career women working in industry or government research labs significantly advance in their careers, either to reach the top of the technical ladder as a distinguished scientist or fellow, or to enter into research management.

Intended Audience.
The workshop targets mid-career lab researchers. We define "mid-career" to mean someone roughly equivalent to an Associate Professor in academia, i.e., well established at her institution and in her research community, but looking to advance further. In the world of research labs, the corresponding job titles vary from institution to institution. For example, at Sun the appropriate title might be staff engineer to senior staff engineer. At AT&T or Sandia National Labs, it would be Senior or Principal Member of the Technical Staff. If you are unsure whether you qualify for the program, please inquire.

Speakers. The Distinguished Researchers who will speak at CAPP-L are the following:

Funding.
The CAPP-L workshop has a $275 registration fee, and the negotiated
room rate at the meeting hotel is $184/night. Full and partial
scholarships are available for individuals whose labs are unable to
providing funding. If you are unsure about funding,
please inquire.

Workshop Structure.
The CAPP-L workshop will be integrated with the CAPP-E and CAPP-R
workshops, which focus on helping associate professors at teaching and
research colleges and universities get promoted to full professors.
Some sessions will be divided into tracks with material of
particular relevance to each of the three groups. Other sessions of
general relevance will bring all participants together. Sessions
specific to the CAPP-L track are likely to include:

  • How to Reach the Top of the Technical Ladder, which will
    address topics such as the factors that go into promotion decisions
    (company contributions, publications, patents, leadership
    activities, etc.), how these factors are weighted, how one learns
    what these factors are, how to avoid/cope with layoffs, and how to get
    support for innovative rather than incremental research.
  • Entering Research Management and Thriving,
    which will focus on how to think about deciding whether to enter
    management, what factors go into hiring managers, what such
    positions involve, whether there are training or mentoring programs
    available to prepare for such a transition, how to cope with
    becoming a manager, how to break into typically male-dominated
    senior management, and how higher-level management positions differ
    from first-line management positions.
  • Managing Opportunities. Jobs in research labs
    offer a huge variety of opportunities with the concomitant challenge
    of managing them. This panel will discuss some of these
    opportunities and challenges, such as: switching into development
    organizations and back, transferring technology into practice,
    interacting with business units and funding agents, collaborating
    with researchers outside of one's home institution, leveraging
    internal and external service opportunities to build a network of
    contacts, and maintaining external visibility to increase job
    security/employability.

Each such session will be lead by senior women from
research labs with relevant experiences and will consist of a formal
presentation and then an open discussion.

Plenary topics are likely to include panels on Time
Management, Managing Professional Service Opportunities, and
Cross-organization collaborations, each of
which will include a representative from each of the three tracks. As
with the track panels, each will include a formal presentation and an
open discussion.

Optional CV Review.
For interested participants, we will provide an opportunity for one-on-one
CV review meetings with the Distingished Professors and Researchers
who are the speakers at the workshop.

Coaching Session.
In addition to the above content, Nancy Houfek will lead a session on
effective communication. Nancy, who serves as Head of Voice and
Speech at the American Repertory Theatre/Institute for Advanced
Theater Training at Harvard University, has served as a consultant on
communication throughout the United States since 1978. Her portion of
the workshop addresses the fact that many accomplished professional
women feel themselves to be less effective than they wish when leading
or participating in discussions, meetings, or group negotiations. They
struggle with feeling unheard, with reactive rather than strategic
behaviors, with physical stress and tension, and with ineffective
speaking voices. The keys to success in such arenas are both strategic
and physical: how one presents oneself and one's ideas is key to
their acceptance. This session, which combines theatre training and
leadership development in an interactive format that encourages highly
personal learning, is designed to enhance women's abilities and
confidence in such situations. It will teach participants techniques
used in theatre and leadership programs to improve performance and
will coach participants in strategic management of discussions and
negotiations.

Speaker Biographies.

Deb Agarwal
is Advanced Computing for Science Department Head and the
Data Intensive Systems Group Lead at the Lawrence Berkeley National
Laboratory, where she has worked since 1994. Dr. Agarwal is also
working with the Berkeley Water Center at University of California,
Berkeley where she has been leading the team developing advanced cyber
infrastructure for geosciences since 2005. Her projects involve
research, development and deployment of computing technologies to
support collaborative scientific research. Her current research focus
is on development of data server infrastructure to significantly
enhance data browsing and analysis capabilities. Her past research
interests include cybersecurity for open science, the design and
implementation of secure and reliable group communication protocols,
and the design and development of collaborative tools. Dr. Agarwal
holds a Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering from University
of California, Santa Barbara and a B.S. in M echanical Engineering
from Purdue University.

Dona Crawford is Associate Director for Computation at Lawrence Livermore National
Laboratory (LLNL), where she is responsible for the development
and deployment of an integrated computing environment for terascale
simulations of complex physical phenomena. This environment includes
high performance computers, scientific visualization facilities,
high-performance storage systems, network connectivity,
multi-resolution data analysis, mathematical models, scalable
numerical algorithms, computer applications, and necessary services to
enable Laboratory mission goals and scientific discovery through
simulation. Icons for the computing environment provided include the
BlueGene/L machine (peak 360 trillion floating-point operations per
second (TF)) and the Advanced Simulation and Computing Purple machine
(peak 100TF).


Prior to her LLNL appointment in July 2001, Ms. Crawford was with
Sandia National Laboratories since 1976, serving on many leadership
projects, including the Nuclear Weapons Policy Board and the Nuclear
Weapons Strategic Business Unit.


Ms. Crawford has served on advisory committees for the National
Science Foundation, the National Research Council, and the Council on
Competitiveness. She is on the Civilian Research and Development
Foundation (CRDF) Board, is a member of the Institute of Electrical
and Electronics Engineers and the Association for Computing Machinery,
is active in the US high performance networking and computing
conference series, and participates in community outreach activities
to promote math and science.

Mary Fernández is Executive Director of Dependable Distributed
Computing Research at AT&T Labs Research. Her personal research sits
at the juncture of database systems and programming languages and
focuses on domain-specific languages for data management in
centralized and distributed environments. Mary is also
Secretary/Treasurer of ACM SIGMOD and an advisory council member of
MentorNet, an e-mentoring program for students in engineering and the
sciences (http://www.mentornet.net).

Laura Haas is
an IBM Distinguished Engineer and Director of Computer Science at
Almaden Research Center. Most recently, she was responsible for
Information Integration Solutions (IIS) architecture in IBM's Software
Group, after leading the IIS development team through its first two
years. Dr. Haas joined the development team in 2001 as manager of DB2
UDB Query Compiler development. Previously, Dr. Haas was a research
staff member and manager at IBM's Almaden Research Center for nearly
twenty years. In Research, she worked on and managed a number of
exploratory projects in distributed database systems. She is best
known for her work on the Starburst query processor (from which DB2
UDB was developed), on Garlic, a system which allowed federation of
heterogeneous data sources, and on Clio, the first semi-automatic tool
for heterogeneous schema mapping. Garlic technology married with DB2
UDB query processing is the basis for WebSphere Information
Integrator's federation capabilities, while Clio capabilities are a
core differentiator for the new Rational Data Architect. Dr. Haas is
an active member of the database community, serving as vice chair of
ACM SIGMOD from 1989-1997, and, currently, as Vice President of the
VLDB Board of Trustees, as well as on many program committees for
technical conferences. She has received several IBM awards for
Outstanding Technical Achievement, and an IBM Corporate Award for her
work on federated database technology. She is a member of the IBM
Academy of Technology, an ACM Fellow, and a member of the Board of
Computing Research Associates.

Susan Landau
is a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems
Laboratories, where she works on security, cryptography, and policy,
including surveillance, identity management, and digital-rights management issues. Landau
had previously been a faculty member at the University of
Massachusetts and Wesleyan University, where she worked in algebraic
algorithms. She is coauthor, with Whitfield Diffie, of ``Privacy on
the Line: the Politics of Wiretapping and Encryption'' (MIT Press,
original edition: 1998; updated and expanded edition: 2007),
participant in a 2006 ITAA study on the security risks of applying the
Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act to VoIP, lead author
on the 1994 ACM study, ``Codes, Keys, and Conflicts: Issues in
U.S. Crypto Policy,'' and author of numerous computer science and
public policy papers. She is currently a member of the editorial
board of IEEE Security and Privacy and a section board member of the
Communications of the ACM, and moderates the ``researcHers'' list, an
international mailing list for women computer science researchers.
Landau served for six years as a member of the National Institute of
Standards and Technology's Information Security and Privacy Advisory
Board. Landau is the recipient of the 2008 Women of Vision Social
Impact Award, a AAAS Fellow, and an ACM Distinguished Engineer. She
received her BA from Princeton, her MS from Cornell, and her PhD from
MIT.

Kristin Lauter
is a Senior Researcher and the head of the Cryptography
Group at Microsoft Research. She directs the group's research
activities in theoretical and applied cryptography and in the related
math fields of number theory and algebraic geometry. Group members
publish basic research in prestigious journals and conferences and
collaborate with academia through joint publications, and by helping
to organize conferences and serve on program committees. The group
also works closely with product groups, providing consulting services
and technology transfer. The group maintains an active program of
post-docs, interns, and visiting scholars. Her personal research
interests include algorithmic number theory, elliptic curve
cryptography, hash functions, and security protocols.

Cynthia Phillips

is a Distinguished Member of the Technical Staff in
the Discrete Mathematics & Complex Systems Department at Sandia
National Laboratories. She received a B.A. in applied mathematics
from Harvard University and a PhD in computer science from MIT. In her
18 years at Sandia National Laboratories she has conducted research in
combinatorial optimization, algorithm design and analysis, and
parallel computation with applications to scheduling, network and
infrastructure surety, integer programming, graph algorithms, vehicle
routing, computational biology, computer security, quantum computing,
wireless networks, and experimental algorithmics. She is one of three
main developers of the PICO massively-parallel integer programming
code. One of her recent projects is the design and analysis of sensor
placement algorithms for municipal water networks. The EPA uses the
sensor-placement toolbox to design contamination warning systems for
US cities. This work was a finalist in the 2008 Edelman award
competition. She also won an R&D 100 award in 2006 as part of a team
that created node allocation algorithms for tightly-coupled
massively-parallel computers. She is currently the program director
for SIAM Special Interest group on supercomputing, was an officer for
5 years for the ACM Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and
Architectures, has been a program committee member/chair for many
conferences, and has done math/science community outreach.

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