PhD Student Elissa Redmiles Named Facebook Fellow for 2017

PhD student Elissa Redmiles has been named a Facebook Fellow for 2017.  She joins twelve other fellows this year.  The fellowship was started six years ago “to encourage and support promising doctoral students engaged in innovative and relevant research across computer science and engineering.”  Redmiles’ advisor is Assistant Professor Michelle Mazurek of Computer Science and the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies.

“This year we received over 800 applications from promising PhD students,” said Rebekkah Hogan, Fellowship Program Manager. “The 2017 Fellows represent some of the most talented young researchers in computer science and engineering disciplines from universities across the globe.”

After learning about this fellowship, Redmiles was invited to the Facebook Women in Research Invitational Summit.  While at the summit, she met Regina Dugan, former head of DARPA, now head of Building 8 (a secret research and development team) at Facebook.  She also heard from women researchers in security and virtual reality, and she met sole woman on the Hadoop team.

“It was ready great to connect with both of them and also to connect with the other attendees,” said Redmiles.  “I really loved that one of the women said that when she was invited to this even and to a Facebook machine learning event, it made her feel really proud and powerful. I thought that was great!”