Professor Margaret Burnett has been on a roll lately, to put it mildly. Her most recent award is the 2017 Undergraduate Research Faculty Mentoring Award announced this month by the Education Committee of the Computing Research Association. This follows a string of awards from national organizations including the CHI Academy, the National Center for Women and Technology, ACM SIGSOFT, and IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing. She was also named 2016 Distinguished Professor recipient by Oregon State University, the highest academic honor the university can bestow on a faculty member.
The following quote comes from the the Education Committee of the Computing Research Association award announcement:
Margaret Burnett, Ph.D., is a distinguished professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Oregon State University (OSU), a member of the ACM CHI Academy, and an ACM Distinguished Scientist. Burnett has contributed pioneering research on how ordinary users interact with software and optimizing that interaction. This resulted, in part, in the development of a new subarea, which is at the intersection of human-computer interaction and software engineering, called end-user software engineering.
Throughout her academic career, Burnett has continuously worked with undergraduate researchers and even accommodated high school students in her lab. She has mentored 39 undergraduate students in research; 21 were from underrepresented groups in computing, 32 co-authored published research papers, and 25 went on to graduate studies. A selection of the honors of her highly accomplished mentees includes three Google Scholarships, three NSF Graduate Fellowships, and two National Physical Sciences Consortium Graduate Fellowships. In her nomination, several mentees attested to her personal influence on and involvement in their lives and careers.
Impressively, Burnett influenced the culture of faculty undergraduate research mentoring in her school, increasing it to 50% participation. She has also led efforts to better support a diverse undergraduate population through trips to the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, the adoption of a diversity plan, and new experimental scholarships for incoming freshmen women in computing. She has received awards from NCWIT, Microsoft, and OSU for her mentoring and research.
