The Sarah Goddard Power Award is presented on behalf of the Academic Women’s Caucus, which was founded in 1975 with the charge ”to develop an inclusive organization of all women faculty members of the Ann Arbor, Dearborn, and Flint campuses of the University of Michigan which will serve as a forum for the exchange of information about the status of faculty women at the University and as a focus for action necessary to the investigation and resolution of their special concerns.”

Named after the late University of Michigan Regent Sarah Goddard Power, this award recognizes individuals who have made significant contributions to the betterment of women through their leadership, scholarship, or other ways in their professional life.

The Carol Hollenshead Inspire Award for Excellence in Promoting Equity and Social Change was created in honor of former director Carol Hollenshead’s twenty-year tenure at the Center for the Education of Women and honors awardees who, like Carol, have proven that social change is possible through persistent hard work and who demonstrate that one person can make a lasting difference in their communities.

Click here to view the digital program (coming soon!)

Presented by the Academic Women’s Caucus and administered by CEW+:

Laura Balzano, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Dr. Laura Balzano is an Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (ECE division), and Statistics by courtesy, at the University of Michigan. Her main research focus is on statistical machine learning with big, messy data — highly incomplete or corrupted data, uncalibrated data, and heterogeneous data — and its applications in a wide range of scientific problems. She has served as PhD supervisor to 10 students, 4 of whom were women or LGBTQ, and has provided research experiences for over 40 Master’s and undergraduate students in her lab, including 13 women. 

Her service roles at the University of Michigan have focused on creating an inclusive environment where students of all backgrounds will achieve excellence. In her service to the ECE Committee for an Inclusive Department, she spearheaded the creation of a division Code of Conduct, which was adopted by the faculty in spring 2023. She currently serves as the only woman on the ECE Executive Committee, a committee that represents the department in major decisions and is filled through a division-wide vote. In all her service roles, she is a strong advocate for women and underrepresented electrical engineers and mathematicians. 

Dr. Balzano teaches Digital Signal Processing, Function Space Methods, Estimation and Detection, and Machine Learning, along with special topics courses. She has developed diversity promoting modules for class, including short technical videos from underrepresented minority engineers, a machine learning ethics lecture about race and gender bias in ML algorithms, as well as a history lesson discussing well-known statisticians who studied/supported eugenics. She is an organizer for “Optimaize Day,” a one-day workshop created by Albert Berahas in IOE for mostly Black high school students from Detroit who come to the Michigan engineering campus and learn about optimization, data science, and the college of engineering at UM. She has presented on machine learning to high school students with Wolverine Pathways, AI 4 All, and Engineering OnRamp. 

She is recipient of the NSF Career Award, ARO Young Investigator Award, AFOSR Young Investigator Award, and faculty fellowships from Intel and 3M. She received an MLK Spirit Award and the Vulcans Education Excellence Award at the University of Michigan. She received the University of Wisconsin Electrical and Computer Engineering Department Alumni Early Career Award. She serves as the Lead Guest Editor for IEEE Signal Processing Magazine’s upcoming Special Issue on the Mathematics of Deep Learning, and as Associate Editor for SIAM Journal on the Mathematics of Data Science and the IEEE Open Journal of Signal Processing.

Presented and awarded by CEW+:

Margo Schlanger, J.D., Wade H and Dores M McCree Collegiate Professor of Law and Professor of Law, Law School

Professor Margo Schlanger is the Wade H. and Dores M. McCree Collegiate Professor of Law.  She teaches constitutional law, torts, and classes relating to civil rights and prisons. She also founded and runs the Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse. She joined the Law School faculty in fall 2009 and is the author of dozens of law reviews and other scholarly articles, and is the lead author of a leading casebook, Incarceration and the Law (2020), http://incarcerationlaw.com. 

Schlanger does substantial work in civil rights and prison and immigration reform. Most recently, she worked as a senior advisor at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, leading USDA’s implementation of its Discrimination Financial Assistance Program, which in summer 2024 distributed $2 billion to over 43,000 people who had experienced discrimination in USDA farm lending. She was class counsel in Hamama v. Adducci, a national class action to ensure due process for Iraqi nationals whom the first Trump Administration sought to deport. She was the court-appointed monitor for a statewide settlement dealing with deaf prisoners in Kentucky. She has served as an expert in numerous cases addressing detention conditions. She took a two-year leave from the University in 2010 and 2011, serving as the presidentially appointed Officer for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Later in the Obama Administration, she assisted in the development of DHS policies relating to reducing sexual abuse and the use of solitary confinement in immigration detention. She also served on the Department of Homeland Security’s Advisory Committee on Family Residential Centers, which recommended abolishing family detention. 

Earlier in her career, Schlanger was a law clerk for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and then a trial attorney in the U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division, where she worked to remedy civil rights abuses by prison and police departments. She was also the reporter for the American Bar Association’s revision of its Standards on the Treatment of Prisoners.

Girls Who Code @ UM-DCMB

Founded by current doctoral students in the Department of Computational Medicine and Bioinformatics (DCMB) at the University of Michigan, the Girls Who Code club seeks to provide a collaborative and supportive environment for high schoolers of all skill levels and backgrounds interested in learning how to code. GWC at UM DCMB teaches computer programming skills to K-12 students through weekly club meetings and other outreach events.

Elysia Chou

Elysia Chou (she/佢) is a 4th-year Bioinformatics PhD candidate and the current director of Girls Who Code at UM-DCMB. She experienced the joys of programming and the importance of mentorship while earning her BS in Biomedical Engineering from the Johns Hopkins University. After teaching English conversation as a Fulbright grantee in South Korea for about a year, she returned to the US to start her PhD in the Gilbert S. Omenn Department of Computational Medicine and Bioinformatics at the University of Michigan in 2021. As an NSF Graduate Research Fellow, Elysia is passionate about building computational tools to better understand the genome and all that affects it under the mentorship of Dr. Maureen Sartor. Hailing all the way from Suriname, South America, Elysia is thrilled to lead Girls Who Code to provide a high-quality coding curriculum and mentorship to students who wouldn’t otherwise get the chance to in high school. Outside of work, she enjoys martial arts, sewing, and spoiling her foster cats.

Mahnoor Gondal

Mahnoor Gondal (she/her) is a 4th-year PhD candidate in Computational Medicine and Bioinformatics at the University of Michigan. Born and raised in Pakistan, Mahnoor completed her undergraduate degree there, where she led the development of TISON, a web-based platform for oncology research. Her current research focuses on investigating mechanisms of cancer immune evasion using novel computational approaches to analyze large-scale single-cell data.

At the University of Michigan, Mahnoor serves as an executive member of the Girls Who Code initiative, teaching Python to female high school students and coordinating curriculum. She is also active in the Graduate Women in Science Programming Committee and Athena’s Signature Series Committee. Mahnoor created the “Consulting Doc” to guide international students through the U.S. graduate school application process.

An aspiring independent researcher, Mahnoor aims to leverage computational biology to improve clinical outcomes for cancer patients while creating a supportive environment for women in academia. Outside of her research, she enjoys poetry, painting, and singing.

Breanna McBean

Breanna McBean (she/her) is a 5th-year PhD student in the Genetics and Genomics Program at the University of Michigan. In 2015, she received her BA in Mathematics with a minor in Computer Science from California State University, Fullerton where she developed mathematical models of the shape of large soap bubbles. At University of Michigan, she is co-mentored by Drs. Alan Boyle and Corey Speers. Her research focuses on developing more effective treatments for both local and systemic control of aggressive breast cancers. Breanna has been involved in many initiatives to increase diversity in STEM fields, serving as the president of the SMART Girls club as an undergraduate and continuing as an executive board member of the Girls Who Code Club as a graduate student. In her free time, Breanna enjoys running, Pilates, and reading. 

Olivia Callahan

Olivia Callahan (she/her) is an enrollment specialist at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan. She also holds a master’s degree in Higher Education with a concentration in Diversity & Social Justice from the University of Michigan. Olivia is passionate about fostering diversity in the technology industry by nurturing the next generation of innovators. As part of this vision, she wrote Girls Who Code’s application for the Phyllis M. Blackman Grant Innovation Grant to promote “Strengthening Community Partnerships,” which the student organization received in 2024. 

James Brissenden

James Brissenden (he/him) graduated from the University of Oregon with a BS in Psychology. In 2019, he received his PhD in Psychological and Brain Sciences from Boston University. James is currently a research scientist in the Cognition, Control, and Action (CoCoA) Lab at University of Michigan. His research aims to reveal the neural underpinnings of our ability to attentionally select and remember visual information using a combination of neuroimaging and non-invasive brain stimulation. Outside of research, he enjoys running, cycling, and spending time with his two daughters.