MITRE Employees Win National Women of Color STEM Awards

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

MCLEAN, Va., December 13, 2010 — The MITRE Corporation is pleased to announce that six employees were recognized for their leadership and accomplishments in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) fields at the 15th annual National Women of Color (NWOC) STEM Conference held in Dallas, Texas from October 28-30. Celia Fu Fremberg was awarded the Managerial Leadership award; Qian Hu was awarded the Research Leadership award; Michele R. Carden-Gayles and Patty Nio-Woods were named Technology All Stars; and Vonda Patterson and Sandra Tirado-Padilla were named Technology Rising Stars.

The NWOC STEM Conference champions the accomplishments of minority women working in information technology. The awards honor professional women who have demonstrated excellence in their work, strong commitment to their communities, and great leadership to young and upcoming leaders, says sponsor Career Communications Group, Inc.

"These are six extraordinary women that are innovators in information technology," said Dr. Lisa Bender, vice president and chief human resources officer at MITRE. "Each of their contributions is setting a path for the next generation of women in STEM careers."

Michele Carden-Gayles

Carden-Gayles is a lead information systems engineer in MITRE's Center for Integrated Intelligence Systems. She works in collaboration with MITRE project managers to maintain sponsor relationships with intelligence staff at senior levels of government, manage risk, and leverage MITRE as a resource to promote cross-program integration and collaboration.

Carden-Gayles retired from the U.S. Armed Forces after a successful career spanning 21 years and joined MITRE in 1999.

She is a member of the National Association of Black Military Women, an organization that strives to preserve the history and heritage of African American women who have served and continue to serve in the military services. Carden-Gayles is also affiliated with Brothers XX₂₀ Incorporated, a Virginia nonprofit organization specializing in youth education programs. Carden-Gayles holds a bachelor's degree in management from National-Louis University with studies in computer science and economics.

Celia Fu Fremberg

Fremberg is the Program Director of the Asia Pacific region for MITRE's Center for Advanced Aviation System Development and is responsible for program/project development, program management, product quality and delivery, and project schedule and financial management. For the past 15 years, Fremberg has worked with the U.S. government and industry, and Asia Pacific aviation officials to promote collaboration in developing Asian countries' expanding aviation infrastructure. Fremberg assists the Federal Aviation Administration and civil aviation authorities around the world in modernizing and automating air traffic control systems, including the Next Generation Air Transportation System. Fremberg has been with MITRE for 20 years. Prior to joining MITRE she was a technical and marketing consultant for IBM.

Fremberg leads a church youth group that encourages young adults to become future leaders. She also speaks at various events to encourage young adults to pursue careers in engineering.

She holds a master's degree in computer science from The Johns Hopkins University and a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Washington University in St. Louis.

Qian Hu

As MITRE's chief scientist of speech technology, Dr. Hu works on speech and natural language processing technologies and develops applications for multimedia and cross-lingual information retrieval and multimodal medical data capture and presentation. She also works on intelligent unmanned aircraft system situation awareness and information delivery. Her innovations in speech and audio search have enabled more robust audio processing and lexical and non-lexical audio feature detection and retrieval, and even multimedia cross-lingual audio retrieval. She has also recently been awarded a U.S. patent for "A Method and System for Audio Hot Spotting," which integrates both linguistic and acoustic models to increase the performance of multimedia information retrieval. Prior to joining MITRE in 2001, Dr. Hu was principal computational linguist and technical manager at Lernout and Hauspie Speech Products.

Dr. Hu has been active in fund-raising activities for natural disaster relief efforts, and has led art and cultural exchange activities in the local schools. Dr. Hu has a Ph.D. in applied linguistics from Boston University, a master's degree in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) from Boston University, a master's degree in linguistics from Huazhong University of Science and Technology, and a bachelor's degree in English language and literature from Huazhong Normal University.

Patricia M. Nio-Woods

Dr. Nio-Woods has 15 years of experience in delivering organizational change management (OCM) and human capital management services to federal agencies. For the past three years Dr. Nio-Woods has been on the MITRE team supporting the Department of Veterans Affairs Financial and Logistics Integrated Technology Enterprise (FLITE) Program. In her role as a strategic advisor, Dr. Nio-Woods provides oversight and technical support in reviewing and assessing FLITE OCM activities throughout the system development life cycle. Prior to joining MITRE in 2007, Dr. Nio-Woods was an associate at Booz Allen Hamilton, a consulting company.

She holds a Ph.D. in industrial/organizational psychology from The University of Georgia, a master's degree in industrial/organizational psychology from Radford University, and a bachelor's degree in psychology (magna cum laude) from Virginia Commonwealth University.

Vonda Patterson

As a lead information systems engineer at MITRE, Patterson serves as task leader of the Standard Economic Processing System Redesign (STEPS II) project for the Census Bureau. Patterson also serves as a strategic advisor and coach in the areas of requirements development, testing, and other phases of the systems development life-cycle. Patterson joined MITRE in 2006 and has more than 15 years of experience in managing complex customized software systems. She was previously an associate for Booz Allen Hamilton, a management consulting company. Patterson is a 17-year member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc., a public service organization. She is a member of the Fort Washington Alumnae Chapter and serves as a co-chair of the Dr. Betty Shabazz Delta Academy, a national initiative to provide opportunities for local Delta chapters to enrich and enhance the education of young minority girls in STEM careers. Patterson also serves her community through MITRE at the Youth Summit on Technology, which aims to get students excited about pursuing STEM careers. For the past two years, she has participated in the mentoring session at MITRE's Young Women in Engineering Day.

She has completed her coursework for a Ph.D. from The George Washington University. Patterson has a master's degree in computer science and applications from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University and a bachelor's degree in computer science from Norfolk State University. Patterson was a Dozoretz Scholar while attending Norfolk State University.

Sandra Tirado-Padilla

Tirado-Padilla is a lead network systems and distributed systems engineer at MITRE supporting intelligence community projects. She is recognized as a subject matter expert in integrating the engineering concept of operations with the tactics, techniques and procedures required to conduct operations in the field. Tirado-Padilla's expertise in database architecture, design and development has proved vital in multiple U.S. government projects. For the past two years, she has been providing project management oversight to more than 10 companies and multiple business areas on behalf of the U.S. government. She joined MITRE in 1998 as a technical staff member in support of a critical sponsor of a national security mission.

Tirado-Padilla graduated with honors with a master's in computer science from The Johns Hopkins University while providing support to the intelligence community during the critical period after the September 11 attacks. She also holds a bachelor's degree in computer engineering from the University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez. Her civic activities include being a judge in a local science fair and supporting programs that encourage girls to study science.

About The MITRE Corporation

The MITRE Corporation (www.mitre.org) is a not-for-profit organization that provides systems engineering, research and development, and information technology support to the government. It operates federally funded research and development centers for the Department of Defense, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Internal Revenue Service and Department of Veterans Affairs, and the Department of Homeland Security, with principal locations in Bedford, Mass., and McLean, Va.

About the National Women of Color STEM Conference

Sponsored by Career Communications Group, Inc., the National Women of Color STEM Conference offers recruitment and networking opportunities and workshops that cover a variety of technical and managerial skill sets. The event also provides opportunities for STEM students and professionals to cultivate career mentoring relationships.

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