Valerie Taylor (computer scientist)

Valerie Elaine Taylor was born May 24, 1963, in Chicago, Illinois. Her father, Willie Taylor, was an electrical engineer at Sonicraft and would bring his children to work with him on Saturdays. Taylor credits her pursuit of a career in science to that early exposure to building circuit boards, reading schematics, and soldering boards. While in high school, she spent her Saturdays attending the Illinois Institute of Technology's Early Identification Program and spent summers in various STEM programs. She holds a patent for her dissertation work on sparse matrices. == Work ==

Shortly after her PhD in 1993, Taylor earned an NSF National Young Investigator Award. From 2003 until 2011, she joined the Texas A&M University faculty as the Head of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, working on high performance computing. While on the faculty of both Northwestern and Texas A&M, Taylor collaborated with research with Argonne National Laboratory, including a summer sabbatical in 2011. Taylor is the CEO & President of the Center for Minorities and People with Disabilities in IT (CMD-IT). The organization seeks to develop the participation of minorities and people with disabilities in the IT workforce in the United States. It hosts an annual Tapia Conference for computer scientists from underrepresented communities, enabling them to share research, find mentors, and network. == Awards and honors ==

Taylor has received numerous awards for distinguished research, leadership, and efforts to increase diversity in computing. She has authored or co-authored more than 100 papers in the area of high performance computing, with a focus on performance analysis and modeling of parallel scientific applications. Taylor is a member of IEEE. In 2013 she was elected a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers "for contributions to performance enhancement of parallel computing applications", and in 2016 as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery for her "leadership in broadening participation in computing." In 2019, she was named an Argonne Distinguished Fellow, an award which represents only three percent of research staff at the facility. Her awards include: • Richard A. Tapia Achievement Award for Scientific Scholarship, Civic Science, and Diversifying Computing • Outstanding Young Engineering Alumni Award from the University of California, Berkeley • Pathbreaker Award from the Women in Leadership at Northwestern University • A. Nico Habermann Award • AccessComputing Capacity Building Award == References ==