A career rewarded
A career rewarded Heading link
Professor Barbara Di Eugenio won a 2022 Association of Women in Science Zenith Award, an honor recognizing senior career professionals for their lifetime achievements in STEM and their commitment to workplace diversity.
Di Eugenio works in the areas of artificial intelligence and natural language processing. Specifically, her research revolves around studying human to human interactions to inform technology that solves societal problems– something she describes as “natural language processing with a purpose.”
She and her colleagues in the computer science department, the college of nursing, and the college of medicine have developed a virtual health coach with input from healthcare professionals, which provides patients with information via text message to encourage behavioral changes aimed at improving health outcomes.
Di Eugenio is the director of graduate studies for computer science at UIC, a role she has held since 2019 and is responsible for about 150 PhD and 250 MS students. She leads a research group that has been continuously funded by national and international funding agencies for over 20 years and has graduated 14 PhD students. Six of those PhD graduates are women–double the national average. And three of her eight current PhD students are women. She mentors two female assistant professors in the department and is hosting a female researcher from Kosovo this semester.
When Di Eugenio joined UIC in 1999, she was the lone woman faculty member in what was then the joint electrical engineering and computer science department, and one of few women faculty members in the College of Engineering.
“I think role models are very important,” Di Eugenio said. “I had a woman as my PhD advisor. I think I would have been successful even if my advisor had been a man, but I think if you have a woman you can identify more readily with her, and believe you can be successful.”