We are very excited to announce this year’s list of “N²Women Rising Stars in Computer Networking and Communications”. The women nominated have all had impact on our field, early in their careers. It was difficult to choose only 10 for this list.
For 2017, in alphabetical order by last name, here are 10 women in networking and communications that you should watch!
 | Heba Aly PhD Student at University of Maryland Heba Aly’s research interests are related to mobile computing, pervasive computing, machine learning, pattern recognition, location determination systems, and ambient assisted living systems. She has several patents and she received the best paper award at ACM SIGSPATIAL 2013. Her contributions in the field are unique given her early stage in her career and achievements during her MSc in the Middle East, where she’s considered a role model for many students. Heba regularly publishes in top tier conferences and journals. She received many awards including the 2015 COMESA Innovation Award and 2017 Google’s Women Techmakers scholarship. – Moustafa Youssef, Egypt-Japan, University of Science and Technology |
 | Claudia Campolo Assistant Professor at Università Mediterranea di Reggio Calabria Claudia Campolo’s research interests are related to Vehicular Networking, Information-Centric networking and Wireless Ad Hoc Networks. She has published her work in the most prestigious IEEE magazine and journals as well as in multiple top-tier conferences. She received many awards, including the IEEE Communication Society EMEA Outstanding Young Researcher Award in 2015. Claudia Campolo is a hardworking, committed and brilliant young professional. She has shown an exceptional career path since the very beginning of her PhD; her contributions to the field of vehicular ad hoc networks are highly cited showing analytical and experimental research work. And her career is just beginning! – Karen Miranda, Metropolitan Autonomous University, Mexico |
 | Monia Ghobadi Researcher at Microsoft Research Monia Ghobadi’s research interests are in the general area of computer networking and systems, including data center networking, optical networks, transport protocols, and software-defined networking. She is interested in designing new networking paradigms as well as building and experimenting with them. Monia is a thought leader in optical networking. Her measurement studies, analysis, and recommendations led to 70% capacity improvement in Microsoft’s optical backbone network. Her research on predicting optical failures mitigated 80% of failures and her proposal for an all-optical DC network and an optical-aware SDN are ground breaking. Her community contributions were recognized with the best dataset award (IMC’16). – Victor Bahl, Microsoft Research |
 | Sharon Goldberg Associate Professor at Boston University As a network security researcher, her work uses tools from theory (cryptography, game-theory, algorithms) and networking (measurement, modeling, and simulation) to understand the hurdles practitioners face when deploying new security technologies, and to develop solutions that surmount them. Sharon is a powerhouse in network security, with the brain of a theorist and the heart of a systems person. She deeply understands modern Internet protocols like BGP, DNS, and NTP, and identifies and fixes their security flaws, with a razor-sharp focus on how to deploy these solutions in practice. She works closely with network operators, standards bodies, and regulators to ensure her models reflects operational reality, and that her solutions cross the chasm to make the Internet more secure. – Jennifer Rexford, Princeton University |
 | Ting He Associate Professor at Pennsylvania State University Ting He’s research interests are in developing novel solutions in the space of network monitoring, scheduling, performance analysis, and optimization using techniques from statistical inference, online learning, stochastic optimization, information theory, and graph theory. She received several awards, including IBM Research Division Award for Scientific Advances in Quality of Information, and Distinguished TPC Member Award at IEEE INFOCOM. I have never worked with a person who pays so much attention to both high-quality research and student success as she does. As a female scholar and researcher, she has set a great role model for me. Aside from research, Ting is well known for her mentorship and service. She was a major force behind the network monitoring and inference algorithms. – Diman Zad Tootaghaj, Pennsylvania State University |
 | Ella Peltonen PhD Student at University of Helsinki Ella Peltonen’s research interests include ubiquitous computing, large-scale data analysis and applied machine learning, everyday sensing, and mobile and wearable devices in general. She has received include the Marc Weiser Best Paper Award given at IEEE PerCom 2015 and she was the Junior Researcher of the Year 2015 in CS Department, University of Helsinki. She has performed very well in her studies, teaching, research and overall university activities. She is striving to improve methods and processes across research and education. She has participated in the design of a data science course and also helped with the planning of dept. data analytics infrastructure. In all, she is an excellent teacher and researcher. – Sasu Tarkoma, University of Helsinki |
 | Meenupriya Swaminathan Postdoctoral Researcher at Northeastern University Meenupriya Swaminathan’s research focuses on Wireless Intra-body Communication for Implantable and Wearable Body Devices using galvanic coupling. She is interested in advanced algorithms for biomedical applications, wireless networking protocols and standards, and classification and clustering based predictive learning. She has published her work in several highly competitive conferences and journals. Ms. Swaminathan has won numerous awards for her pioneering work on intra-body implant communications. She has won the prestigious NCWIT Collegiate Award for 2016, which honors the outstanding technical accomplishments of college women. The ECE department gave her the Research Impact Award in May 2015. – Kaushik Chowdhury, Northeastern University |
 | Eirini Eleni Tsiropoulou Postdoctoral Researcher at University of Maryland Eirini Eleni Tsiropoulou’s research interests are related to resource allocation and optimization in heterogeneous wireless networks, distributed optimization and game theory, Cyber-physical Systems, Internet of Things, RFID technology, passive Tag-to-Tag communication. She has solid theoretical background and extremely high quality research as demonstrated by the results of her corresponding publications. She obtaining a PhD at NTUA in Greece in 2014 and she managed to recently secure a tenure track Assistant Professor position in USA (at University of New Mexico) starting Fall 2017. – Symeon Papavassiliou, National Technical University of Athens |
 | Ying Zhang Software Engineer, Facebook Ying Zhang works on large scale network management problems and her research interests are in Software-Defined Networks, Network Function Virtualization, network monitoring, Internet routing, and network security. She has 30+ granted US/International patents, 50 peer-reviewed publications with about 1500 citations, and she was named by Swedish media as Mobile Network 10 Brightest Researcher. Dr. Ying Zhang is a rising star in the networking research community with strong technical accomplishments in just 8 years since finishing her Ph.D. Her impactful innovations in SDN, NFV, monitoring and security have been recognized by both academia (e.g., invitations to prestigious conference program committees such as MobiSys and SoSR) and industry with corporate recognition awards. – Sujata Banerjee, VMware |
 | Xia Zhou Assistant Professor at Dartmouth College Xia Zhou’s research interest lies broadly in mobile systems and wireless networking. Her current projects include visible light communication systems and applications, mobile sensing, and efficient monitoring and enforcement of the radio spectrum usage. Among others, she received the NSF Career Award in 2016 and the Google Faculty Research Award in 2014. Xia is an extremely innovative researcher, exploring novel concepts in visual-light networking and sensing, as well as traditional Wi-Fi and RF networking. She inspires students and leads her group to regular MobiCom and MobiSys papers. She has been extremely active in the community, serving on numerous TPCs. She is also an inspiring teacher and mentor at Dartmouth. – David Kotz, Dartmouth College |
