Rebecca Parsons (Ph.D. ’92) is winner of the 2018 Technical Leadership Abie Award given by Anitab.org. It recognizes women who demonstrate leadership through contributions that strengthen the impact of women on technology. Parsons is ThoughtWorks’ chief technology officer.
The award will be presented during the 2018 Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing conference. Lydia Kavraki, the Noah Harding Professor of Computer Science and a professor of bioengineering, was the recipient in 2015.
Parsons’ experience includes applications development, leading the creation of large-scale distributed object applications and the integration of disparate systems. Commitment to increasing the number of women in STEM fields led Parsons to serve on the board of CodeChix and as an adviser at Women Who Code. She was chair of the Agile Alliance board of directors for six years.
“My desire is to be an impactful technologist,” Parsons said in an interview on the Anitab.Org website. “It makes a big difference to me to be able to have an impact on the world. I would like for people, when they look back at my career, to see the positive impact that I’ve had through the things that I’ve done, the projects that I’ve worked on, and the people I’ve worked with.”
Parsons is a speaker and co-author of “Domain-Specific Languages,” “The ThoughtWorks Anthology” and “Building Evolutionary Architectures.”
Rice University is a gold academic sponsor of the Sept. 26-28 event, which will bring 20,000 women technologists to Houston’s George R. Brown Convention Center. The conference promotes the progress of women in technology. Some 125 Rice faculty, staff and students will attend the conference.
Photo: Martin Fowler
Cintia Listenbee, Marketing and Communications Specialist in Computer Science