Sasha Fedorova (l) accepts the Anita Borg award from her former PhD advisor Margo Selzer

Alexandra (Sasha) Fedorova, an Assistant Professor at SFU Computing Science, won the prestigious 2011 Anita Borg Early Career Award. This annual award recognizes a woman in computer science and/or engineering who has made a significant research impact and who has contributed to her profession, particularly by reaching out to women.

Fedorova has a team of 11 graduate students and takes every opportunity to encourage women to see the joys of computing science.

"Women often feel shy entering computer science and engineering, because of the perception that this field is ‘for guys’,” said Fedorova. “I feel that they are missing out on an opportunity to explore this creative, challenging and extremely rewarding profession. I hope to show them that our field is really fun and friendly to men and women alike."

Fedorova has spoken at many career and technical workshops for women and minorities, acted as a mentor in the Canadian Distributed Mentor Project and participated in ScienceAlive camps that introduced middle-school kids to technology.

In 2006, Fedorova earned her PhD at Harvard University and while developing her thesis on Operating System Scheduling for Chip Multithreaded Processors, she worked closely with Sun Microsystems Research Labs. During a three-year internship she co-developed the simulator for one of Sun’s processors. Today, her main research stream revolves around improving efficiency of multicore processors by improving the synergy between hardware and software.

She leads the systems research group at SFU and is a co-director and co-founder of the Systems, Networking and Architecture (SYNAR) research lab. Fedorova’s research is supported by government and industry through organizations such as Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), British Columbia Innovation Council, Oracle, Google, Intel, ST Microelectronics and Research in Motion.

The Anita Borg Early Career Award is named for the late Anita Borg, who was an early member of Computer Research Association's Committee on the Status of Women in Computing Research (CRA-W) and an inspiration for her commitment in increasing the participation of women in computing research.

For more information, contact fascomms@sfu.ca.