32nd Annual Exploratorium Awards Dinner Honors “Women in Science”

Noted IBM computer scientist Frances Allen, NYU interactive technologist Red Burns, computer scientist and Google vice-president Marissa Mayer, SLAC particle physicist and professor Helen Quinn, and Harriet Wallberg-Henriksson President of Karolinska Institutet, Sweden

May 18, 2009. Reception begins at 6:30pm

On May 18, 2009, the Exploratorium hosts the 32nd Annual Awards Dinner. At a time when more young girls are being encouraged to take an interest in the sciences and to consider scientific careers, the Exploratorium is paying homage to five individuals who paved the way for future female scientists while making an indelible mark in their respective fields. This year the Exploratorium celebrates Women in Science: Inspiring Women in the Field, as part of its long tradition of honoring leaders in science, technology, and education for over thirty years. The honorees include noted IBM computer scientist Frances Allen, NYU interactive technologist Red Burns, computer scientist and Google vice-president Marissa Mayer, SLAC particle physicist and professor Helen Quinn, and Harriet Wallberg-Henriksson, President of Karolinska Institutet, Sweden.

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The Awards Dinner Honorary Committee includes Physicist Frances Hellman, Chair; Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz and Bill Marr; Harvey and Gail Glasser, Jennifer Siebel Newsom and Gavin Newsom; Diane B. Wilsey and Venture Capitalist Ann Winblad, among others.

Noted science journalist and author K.C. Cole will act as Master of Ceremonies. Over 500 guests are anticipated. The reception begins at 6:30pm. Dinner begins at 7:30pm. Table sponsorships range from $50,000 to $5,000. Individual tickets are $500. For more information, please call the Exploratorium’s Development Department at (415) 353-0424, or e-mail amoon@exploratorium.edu or visit www.exploratorium.edu/support/awards_dinner.

Funds generously provided through the Exploratorium Awards Dinner are used to develop and maintain the 400+ educational exhibits that are the heart of educational programming for training teachers in the Greater Bay Area, as well as in 862 school districts in 39 states. The funds also enable the Exploratorium to reach out to underserved audiences in the community, and to make science content easily understandable and freely available to the 20 million annual visitors to our Website.

The honorees are:

Computer scientist Frances Allen took a position at IBM in 1957 to pay off her graduate school debt. Trained as a high school mathematics teacher, she says she always “intended to go back to my first love: teaching mathematics,” but made her career at IBM for 45 years until her retirement in 2002. Her achievements include seminal work in compilers, code optimization, and parallelization. She was named the first woman IBM Fellow, and, in 2006, became the first woman to win the A. M. Turing Award.

Arts Professor and Chair of the Interactive Telecommunications Program in the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, Red Burns has made a tremendous impact on the communications field. During the 1970s, as head of NYU’s Alternate Media Center, she designed and directed a series of projects that included two-way television for and by senior citizens. She also created telecommunications applications to serve the developmentally disabled. Honors include the Distinguished Leadership Award for achievement in technology from the New York Hall of Science and the Mayor of New York’s Award for Excellence in Science and Technology.

Marissa Mayer serves as Vice President of Search Products and User Experience at Google. After graduating from Stanford University, where she specialized in artificial intelligence, Ms. Mayer became Google’s first female engineer in 1999. She now shapes the design of some of their most well-known products including Google.com, Google Maps, and Google Earth. Committed to science education, she teaches undergraduate computer science courses at Stanford, where she received the Centennial Teaching Award and the Forsythe Award for her outstanding contribution to undergraduate education.

Particle physicist and Professor of Physics at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, Helen Quinn received the Dirac Medal of the International Center for Theoretical Physics for her pioneering contributions to the quest for a unified theory of quarks and leptons and of the strong, weak, and electromagnetic interactions. A native of Australia, she moved to the United States to earn her Ph.D. in physics at Stanford University. She completed her postdoctoral work at the German Synchrotron Laboratory in Hamburg, Germany. She is a Fellow and Past President of the American Physical Society, a Member of the National Academy of Sciences, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Harriet Wallberg-Henriksson has been President of Karolinska Institutet (KI) since 2004 and is a member of KI’s Nobel Assembly, which selects each year’s winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. After receiving her master’s and doctoral degrees from KI, she was appointed Professor in Physiology and later Dean of Research. Her knowledge, interest, and experience in the research policy field have been drawn from numerous appointments, including Secretary General (2001–2003) of the Swedish Research Council’s Scientific Council for Medicine. She’s represented Sweden on the boards of the European Science Foundation and the WHO’s Agency for Cancer Research.