Announcement from the Dean of Computer and Information Science:
Dear CIS community,
I am delighted to announce that Hakim Weatherspoon, Associate Professor of Computer Science, has agreed to serve as the Interim Associate Dean for Diversity and Inclusion for CIS.
Since joining Cornell, Prof. Weatherspoon has been instrumental in leading important efforts within CIS to support our underrepresented undergraduate and graduate communities. Since 2011, he has organized the annual SoNIC Summer Research Workshop to help prepare undergraduates from underrepresented groups to pursue Ph.D.s in computer science. He also co-founded CSMore, the Rising Sophomore Summer Program in Computer Science, which has been acknowledged with an “Inspiring Programs in STEM” Award by Insight into Diversity. In early 2020, he co-organized two Code Afrique hackathons in Ghana and Eswatini (formerly Swaziland), each hosting more than 250 students. Prof. Weatherspoon has also been a key player in founding and advising the Underrepresented Minorities in Computing (URMC) student groups for undergraduates and graduates. He has served as mentor for many of our students (officially and unofficially), and has been recognized for his work to promote diversity with Cornell’s Zellman Warhaft Commitment to Diversity Award (2014). Beyond Cornell, Prof. Weatherspoon also represents Cornell on the national stage, serving on the Computing Research Association Widening Participation (CRA-WP) board, and as a National Science Foundation INCLUDE FLIP Alliance advocate.
Prof. Weatherspoon has also been recognized by multiple prestigious awards for his research in the computer systems community, including an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, a National Science Foundation Career Award, the Alumni Achievement Award from the University of Washington’s Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering, and a Kavli Fellowship from the National Academy of Sciences. He serves as Vice President of the USENIX Board of Directors and on the Steering Committee for the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Symposium on Cloud Computing. He also serves as Associate Director for the Cornell Institute for Digital Agriculture (CIDA) and is the co-director of the annual CIDA hackathon.
We have many difficult challenges ahead of us, and I look forward to working with Hakim in this new role. He will serve in this role till the end of the calendar year, after which he will be on sabbatical at his company, Exotanium.
I also want to thank Éva Tardos, Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of Computer Science, the outgoing Associate Dean, who has been appointed Chair of the Computer Science department. As the Associate Dean for Diversity and Inclusion this past year, and even before then, Éva has had a major impact on CIS’s diversity and inclusion efforts, through her tireless development and advancing of diversity and inclusion initiatives. We are grateful for her contributions.
Please join me in thanking Éva and welcoming Hakim as CIS’s Interim Associate Dean for Diversity and Inclusion.
Best,
Kavita Bala
Dean
Computing and Information Science
Cornell University