'Smart girls always have options'
Tammara Combs walked into her dissertation defense at the iSchool with a 2-year-old in wet diapers and a patient 4-year-old who, at meeting’s end, walked up to Combs’ adviser and said “Thank you for helping my Mom save people.” The boy extended his hand for a gentlemanly shake. The year was 2008, and Combs, a lifelong math lover, had beaten all the odds in earning her Ph.D. She was a single mother, recently divorced, and a minority working full-time at Microsoft, where she was a rising star, mining and crunching data on newsgroups and their conversation threads. In her spare time, s