Awards

School of Informatics Career Achievement Award - 2015

About Jennifer Widom

After coming to Indiana University to study music, Dr. Jennifer Widom has built an incredible career in computer science education. She received a B.S. in music with minors in mathematics and computer science at Indiana University, and continued on for her M.S. in computer science at IUB. After attaining a Ph.D. in computer science from Cornell University, she was a researcher at the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, one of the original anchors of Silicon Valley.

From there, Dr. Widom became an assistant professor at the Stanford University, where she is currently the Fletcher Jones Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering and working on nontraditional data management. She was the chair of the Computer Science Department from 2009 to 2014 and is now senior associate dean for faculty and academic affairs in the School of Engineering. She has served as principal or co-principal investigator on over 20 grants totaling over $18 million dollars from a range of agencies, including DARPA, Yahoo!, and the National Science Foundation.

Dr. Widom has received wide recognition for her work. She is an ACM Fellow, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and of the National Academy of Engineering. Earlier this year, in a less academic realm, she was one called one of "54 Women Who Rocked the Tech World," by Business Insider UK. She received the ACM-W Athena Lecturer Award in 2015, the ACM SIGMOD Edgar F. Codd Innovations Award in 2007, and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2000.