Ph.D. student Jill Palzkill Woelfer is the recipient of a $10,000 Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship. The scholarship will support her research with UW iSchool Associate Professor David Hendry regarding homeless young people and their interactions with information systems. This research will serve as the foundation for her dissertation.
"We've been working with homeless young people for the last 32 months. We work with young people age 13 to 25, and we work with the nine different service agencies in the University District and the young people who come here for services," Woelfer said.
Woelfer's current work with homeless youth is the latest of three research projects on the subject. In the first, which was the subject of an article in November 2009 in the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (JASIST), she investigated the use and purpose of paper brochures and fliers, and proposed a set of interrelated design prototypes, including the InfoBike, a mobile prototype for distributing informational materials to homeless youth. In the second, she co-wrote a grant that was funded by the State of Washington to establish a community technology center for homeless young people, where she volunteers as a teacher in computer-related life skills classes. To date, 75 young people have participated in classes, learning about résumé writing and the ins and outs of online job applications. The third project resulted in a paper, titled "Homeless Young People's Experience with Information Systems: Life and Work in a Community Technology Center," which was published in April 2010 at the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI).
Woelfer plans to use the funds to support her next year of the Ph.D. program in preparation for the general exam.
The Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship is given in honor of Dr. Anita Borg, a computer scientist who dedicated her life to changing the way that we think about diversity and technology. Now in its seventh year, the scholarship recognizes and encourages the next generation of female technical leaders and role models. This year, 32 scholars were chosen from 62 finalists in the United States.
The scholarship is funding Woelfer's attendance at the Annual Google Scholars' Retreat in June at the Googleplex in Mountain View, California, and the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing Conference in Atlanta at the end of September. "I'm particularly looking forward to meeting women from all over the world who are interested in computing," she said.
The full list of finalists and winners is available on the Google blog.