AWIS Chicago will honor Kate Keahey – 2015 Innovator Award Recepient and Dimitra Georganopoulou-2015 Motivator Award Recipient.

Kate Keahey, Ph.D.

Kate is a computer scientist at Argonne National Laboratory and a senior fellow at the University of Chicago Computation Institute. Why She Won: Kate Keahey received her Ph.D. in computer science from Indiana University in 1997. She then joined Los Alamos National Laboratory, where her research helped lay the foundation for the design of the Common Component Architecture. In 2001, she joined Argonne National Laboratory, where she is a computer scientist. She is also a senior fellow at the University of Chicago Computation Institute. Keahey is the creator of Nimbus, a world-renowned toolkit for turning a cluster into an infrastructure-as-a-service cloud. She has also served as co-principal investigator and principal investigator on several federally funded projects, including the DOE Center for Enabling Distributed Petascale Science; the NSF Chameleon project to develop a large-scale reconfigurable experimental environment for cloud research; and a DOE project to develop an architecture for online data analysis. Currently, she is also chair of the Advisory Board of Grid’5000 and vice-chair of the cloud computing track for CCGrid 2015.

Dimitra Georganopoulou, Ph.D.

Dimitra Georganopoulou is the Innovation and Commercialization Officer of the Innovation and New Ventures Office (INVO) at Northwestern University.
Why She Won: Dimitra uses her wide range of experience in industry and academic settings to to encourage female scientists to find a way to incorporate their passions into any work environment, cultivate their professional relationships, and believe in their place in the field of their choosing. Dimitra was the Head of Operations and Vice President of Research & Development of Ohmx Corporation, an in-vitro diagnostics and biomarker development company. She had previously worked for Nanosphere and Inverness Medical (now Alere) in biosensor development. She is the co-founder of Global Scientific Editing (GSE) and the President of Women in Bio (WIB). She serves on the Board of Chicago American Association of Clinical Chemists (C-AACC) and on the Springboard Life Sciences Alumnae Committee.