Gloria Childress Townsend, Professor and Chair of Computer Science, has taught Computer Science at DePauw University for 44 years and chaired her department for nine of those years. She founded ACM Celebrations and chaired the ACM-W Chapters project, during her 17-year tenure with ACM's Council on Women in Computing. Both ACM's Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE) and her graduate school, Indiana University Bloomington's School of Informatics, awarded Townsend their Lifetime Service Awards for this work.
Townsend's research interests include evolutionary computation and broadening participation in computing. She collaborated with biologists and a mathematician as a Co-Principal Investigator in a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant from the Division of Environmental Biology. Townsend's contribution, simulations based on evolutionary computation methods, advanced the research group's publications. She also served as the Principal Investigator (PI) for a Scholarships in STEM (S-STEM) NSF grant that recruited, retained, and supported first-generation students. Later, as PI for a Broadening Participation in Computing (BPC) NSF grant, Townsend launched 12 ACM Celebrations (US-based regional conferences for women in computing), which later spread to Serbia, Chile, Ukraine, Canada, The Philippines, Pakistan, Ireland, Turkey, Spain, Azerbaijan, and India, to name a few.
