Recent CS Research Associate from UT Dallas Wins 2014 Emerging Leader Award
Thamar Solorio, 2014 Winner of the Grace Hopper Celebration Denice Denton Emerging Leader ABIE Award, is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Prior to this position, she held a post-doctoral Research Associate position in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Dallas. She earned a PhD in Computer Science in 2005 from the Instituto Nacional de Astrofísica, Óptica, y Electrónica (INAOE), in Puebla, México. Her M.S. degree (2002) is in Computer Science from INAOE. Her B.S. degree in Computer Systems Engineering is from the Universidad Autónoma de Chihuahua, Facultad de Ingeniería, Chihuahua, México.
Solorio’s research focuses on authorship analysis, child language assessment from narratives, mixed-language processing in social media, and information extraction from clinical records and patient generated data. Solorio has aimed at increasing the number of underrepresented minorities in Computer Science through craving research projects that have a tangible societal impact. She is also committed to increase the collaboration ties among researchers across the Americas, and in particular to forge a stronger Natural Language Processing community in Latin America. In 2010 she co-organized the first workshop for young researchers on languages of the Americas. This NSF funded workshop brought together young NLP scientists across the Americas that were interested in building new collaborations. The meeting enabled young scientists to identify new partnerships that are still active today. It also inspired other initiatives across the region, such as the Latin-American Workshop on Automated Language Processing that took place in Puebla, Mexico, last summer, where she was an invited panelist.
Solorio has served as area chair for the Annual Meetings of the Association of Computational Linguistics, as a reviewer for several journals including Artificial Intelligence in Medicine and Natural Language Engineering, and as a PC member for more than 20 conferences. Her research is funded by the National Science Foundation and the Office of Naval Research. Solorio recently received a prestigious CAREER award for her research on authorship attribution.
The Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing is the World’s Largest Gathering of Women Technologists. It is produced by the Anita Borg Institute and presented in partnership with ACM.