Valerie Barr
Valarie Barr is an American computer scientist with an endowed chair in the department of Computer Science at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts. She is known for her work with women in computing. Education. Barr earned her Bachelor of Science in Applied mathematics from Mount Holyoke in 1977, her Masters from New York University in 1979, and earned her PhD in Computer Science in 1996 from Rutgers University. Career. She taught at Hofstra University on Long Island nine years before becoming department chair at Union College in 2004 where she worked on updating the introductory courses  in computer science to appeal to underrepresented groups in computer science and to broaden non-major exposure to the field of computer science. From 2012–2017, she served as the chair of ACM's Council on Women in Computing. She served as a program director at the United States National Science Foundation in the Division of Undergraduate Education during 2013–2014. Her work as program director ended early as a result of questions related to political activity in the 1980s. In 1999, Barr was the recipient of the NSF POWRE award, and in 2007, she was awarded the NSF Computer and Information  Science and Engineering (CISE) Pathways to Revitalized Undergraduate Computing Education (CPATH) Institutional Transformation Award. In 2008, Barr and Elaine Weyuker organized a major ACM-W initiative to provide scholarships to women students who want to attend research conferences. This program is still running and annually provides between 30 and 40 scholarships a year for women students from around the world who are interested in attending conferences that will help them further their interests in computing. In 2016, she served as an Academic Corner Speaker at the Anita Borg Institute international conference Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. She became  an ACM Senior Member in 2009 and earned the 2016 Outstanding Contribution to ACM Award for "broadening the impact of ACM-W, increasing its effectiveness in supporting women in computing worldwide, and encouraging participation in ACM." In 2017, she was named the first person to hold the Jean E. Sammet Chair in Computer Science at Mount Holyoke College. In 2019, Barr was named a Distinguished Member of the ACM.