ACM Frances E. Allen Award for Outstanding Mentoring

Award presented to an individual who has exemplified excellence and/or innovation in mentoring with particular attention to recognition of individuals who have shown outstanding leadership in promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion in computing.

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is an international non-profit learned membership society for computing based in the United States. It was founded in 1947, and is the world’s largest scientific and educational computing society.

The ACM Frances E. Allen Award for Outstanding Mentoring was established in 2021 and is presented biennially to an individual who has exemplified excellence and/or innovation in mentoring with particular attention to recognition of individuals who have shown outstanding leadership in promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion in computing.

Nominations will be reviewed for the quality, breadth, and impact of the candidate’s mentoring contributions to ACM and its community. That impact might be, for example, on the basis of single but very important contribution, activities that have served a particularly broad community of beneficiaries, or a sustained record of contributions over many years. This impact could include, for example, mentoring of significant numbers of students who have successfully completed their degree in computing and have gone on to careers in industry or academia. Alternatively, that impact might take the form of mentoring early career professionals in either academia or industry who have had career interruptions or who experience a significant work change as may be the case for new industry hires immediately following their degree completion.

The award is supported by Microsoft Research.