Anita Borg Institute Announces New Board of Trustees Members

The Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology (ABI) announced today the addition of Mark Bregman, executive vice president and chief technology officer of Symantec and two students, Eugenia Gabrielova and Shanna-Shaye Forbes, to the Anita Borg Institute Board of Trustees. The students join the current Board of Trustees made up of senior executives from leading technology companies and academics who are focused on the recruitment, retention and advancement of technical women.

Mark Bregman is executive vice president and chief technology officer at Symantec, responsible for the Symantec Research Labs, Symantec Security Response and shared technologies, emerging technologies, architecture and standards, localization and secure coding, and developing the technology strategy for the company. Bregman guides Symantec's investments in advanced research and is responsible for the company's development centers in India and China. He holds a bachelor's degree in physics from Harvard College and a master's degree and doctorate in physics from Columbia University.

"The work of the Anita Borg Institute to develop women leaders in technology disciplines is critically important for the industry," said Mark Bregman, executive vice president, chief technology officer, Symantec. "As a global company, Symantec recognizes that diversity fuels innovation, creative problem solving and enhanced productivity."

Eugenia Gabrielova is a senior at Northwestern University, studying Computer Science in the McCormick School of Engineering. Eugenia has worked on Distributed Systems research in the Aqualab at Northwestern. In Summer 2009, she researched at the Databases Lab at the University of Washington as a participant in the CRA-W Distributed REU program. Her areas of study include the fields of distributed systems, information retrieval and machine learning.

Shanna-Shaye Forbes is a PhD student at the University of California Berkeley. She received her Bachelors of Science in Electrical Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin, and her masters degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of California Berkeley. Her interests include real-time scheduling, operating systems, concurrent and distributed systems, as well as embedded systems.

"The student perspective is critical to our vision of women being equally represented in positions of power and influence. At the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing almost 50% of our attendees were students," said Telle Whitney, president and CEO of the Anita Borg Institute. "We believe it is important to our work to increase the impact of women on technology to include both an undergraduate and graduate student as members of our Board of Trustees."

"It's a great honor to be one of the first students to join the ABI Board of Trustees," said Eugenia Gabrielova. "The Anita Borg Institute offers programs that have a positive impact on students future careers. Attending the Grace Hopper Celebration this year provided me with a combination of networking, career guidance and exposure to new technologies that I cannot find anyplace else."

"Attending the Board of Trustees meeting was a great experience for me," said Shanna-Shaye Forbes. "Students travel from around the world to attend the Grace Hopper Celebration and I look forward to helping to make their experiences even better in the coming years."

About the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology (ABI)

The Anita Borg Institute provides resources and programs to help industry, academia, and government recruit, retain, and develop women leaders in high-tech fields, resulting in higher levels of technological innovation. ABI programs serve high-tech women by creating a community and providing tools to help them develop their careers. ABI is a not-for-profit 501(c) 3 charitable organization. ABI Partners include: Google, Microsoft, HP, Cisco, First Republic Bank, Intel, National Science Foundation, NetApp, SAP, Sun Microsystems, Symantec, IBM, Lockheed Martin, Thomson Reuters, CA, Intuit, Amazon, Facebook, Raytheon, and Genentech. For more information, visit www.anitaborg.org.

SOURCE: Anita Borg Institute

Anita Borg Institute 
Jerri Barrett, 650-857-6095 
jerrib@anitaborg.org

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