Alumna Rebecca Taylor Honored with Alumni Achievement Award

October 21, 2011
News

Photo of Rebecca Taylor 2011At the LAS College Alumni Awards ceremony that took place Thursday October 20, Rebecca Taylor (BS 1984), an outstanding role model for entrepreneurship in technology, was recognized for her outstanding career achievements. 

Rebecca Taylor is our B.S. alumna from 1984, and is now IEEE Engineering & Diplomacy Fellow for 2011, and serves the U.S. State Department as a Senior Adviser on Innovation & Entrepreneurship in the Office of the Science & Technology Advisor to the Secretary of State. In addition to her B.S. in Computer Science, she also has a Master's degree in Public Affairs from the University of Texas at Austin. In her role with the State Department, Ms. Taylor offers counsel on ways to better connect with smaller companies that may have innovative solutions to problems that the U.S. State Department is trying to solve. 

Our departmental relationship with Rebecca Taylor was re-established last March, when she was invited to campus by the Pappajohn Center as part of the 2011 Reiman Entrepreneur Speaker Series. In Computer Science, we see many students who hope to engage with entrepreneurship, start their own companies, and direct their creativity and expertise towards problems that are interesting, compelling, and important not only to them but to our society and our world. Rebecca has met with some of those students and talked with them. We hope to be able to introduce her to more of our entrepreneurship-minded students in the future. She is an outstanding role model for them, and in that spirit, we were pleased to present her with a 2011 Computer Science Department Alumni Achievement Award.