Vassar will celebrate Grace Hopper, America’s “Queen of Code,” with an event at The Vassar Institute for the Liberal Arts. Hopper, Vassar Class of 1928, arrived at the College as a student a century ago. While much of pop culture assigns the origins of the modern tech era to the garages of men on the West Coast, the centennial celebration honors the legacy of a woman whose early tech industry impact was made from a lab on the East Coast during World War II. Also called the ”Mother of Modern Computing,” Hopper majored in mathematics and physics (before it was possible to major in computer science) and returned to Vassar to become a mathematics professor. In addition to her contributions to the nascent field of Computer Science, she rose to the rank of Rear Admiral in the U.S. Navy.

Join us in celebrating a trailblazer who not only revolutionized computing but also understood the longstanding and critically important relationship between the liberal arts and technological innovation. While this event is open to the public, registration is required.

Highlights Include

• A fireside chat with tech entrepreneur Naomi Seligman ’55, a mentee of Grace Hopper, who will share never-before-heard anecdotes and personal accounts.
• Remarks by Kurt Beyer, author of the most acclaimed biography of Grace Hopper.
• A panel of alums led by a founding member of Vassar’s Computer Science Department, Professor Emerita Nancy Ide. Panelists include: Peter Leonard ’97, Director of Customer Engineering Excellence, Google Cloud; Reena Mehta ’01, Former Senior Vice President of Streaming and Digital Content at ABC News; Alison Albeck Lindland ’00, CMO of Movable Ink, and Matt Foster ’14, Game designer at Insomniac Games.
• Professor Marc L. Smith, Chair of the Computer Science Department, will serve as emcee for the event.

Speaker Bios

Dr. Kurt Beyer is a faculty member at UC Berkeley’s Haas Business School, where he directs the Haas Executive Program and teaches the prestigious Entrepreneurship Program. He founded and is the General Partner of the Cal Innovation Fund, an early-stage venture capital fund affiliated with UC Berkeley. Kurt has advised executives at major companies like Yelp and Airbnb and managed $9 billion in assets at Parallel Advisors. He also established the Karl F. Beyer Oxford/Annapolis scholarship and the Beyer Foundation. A former F-14 Tomcat pilot, Kurt authored Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age, which inspired a documentary and an upcoming biopic. He holds degrees from the U.S. Naval Academy, Oxford University, and UC Berkeley, and resides in Marin County with his family.

Matthew Foster ’14 is an Advanced Senior Game Designer at Insomniac Games in Los Angeles, California. Since joining Insomniac in March 2021, he has focused on designing and implementing progression, combat, and open-world systems, initially working on Spider-Man 2 and later leading systems design for all Insomniac projects. Prior to Insomniac, Matthew was a Senior Game Designer at CD PROJEKT RED, where he worked on Cyberpunk 2077, focusing on weapons, RPG, and prototype systems. He also held roles at Bossa Studios, where he was the lead designer for the Apple Arcade launch title Hogwash, and at Counterplay Games, where he contributed to the early development of Godfall. Additionally, Matthew has experience at Hangar 13, working on Mafia 3 and its DLCs, and has provided studio and IT support early in his career. His extensive expertise in systems and combat design has been instrumental in enhancing gameplay experiences across various high-profile projects and studios.

Nancy Ide is Professor Emerita of Computer Science and currently Research Professor of Computer Science at Brandeis University, as well as Honorary Professor at the University "A.I. Cuza" in Iasi, Romania. She established the Computer Science Department and major at Vassar in 1990, serving as chair until 2009 and retiring in 2021. A prolific author in computational linguistics, she has contributed significantly to word sense disambiguation and computational lexicography. She co-founded the Text Encoding Initiative and the ACL SIGANN, and has been involved in numerous federally-funded projects. She co-edited the Handbook of Linguistic Annotation and is co-editor-in-chief of the journal Language Resources and Evaluation. Since 1997, she has co-organized the EUROLAN summer schools in computational linguistics.

Peter Leonard ’97 is the Director of Customer Engineering Excellence for Google Cloud, focusing on making the industry’s leading Customer Engineering organization even better. His professional experience spans over 25 years of hands-on and leadership work in the technology industry, with roles including software development, operations, support, consulting, and sales engineering. In his 14 years at Google, Peter has held customer-facing engineering leadership roles in both the Ads and Cloud organizations, partnering with clients to bring the best of Google to bring innovative solutions to their challenges. Peter holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Vassar College and an MBA from the NYU Stern School of Business.

Alison Albeck Lindland ’00. As CMO of Movable Ink, the world's fastest growing AI-powered personalization platform, Alison leads the Marketing and Client Strategy Teams. She joined the company 12 years ago as the 14th employee and is proud to be the founder of Movable Pink, the women's employee network. Prior to Movable Ink, she worked in Business Development at American Express OPEN, developing ways to help SMBs market their companies online through programs like Small Business Saturday with partners like Facebook. At Amex, she also led product management and marketing for the first iPhone App and contributed to mobile strategy projects throughout the global organization. Prior to attending Columbia Business School, she began her career in tech at OgilvyInteractive and TheaterMania.com/OvationTix.

Reena Mehta ’01 was most recently the SVP of Streaming and Digital Content Strategy at ABC News/Disney managing the direct-to-consumer content strategy and pipeline. She is an Emmy, Peabody, and Dupont award-winning content executive who oversaw the development and content slate for unscripted documentaries and narrative nonfiction series for ABC News Studios across Hulu and Disney+. She also managed ABC News Live, ABC News digital, social handles, and podcasts. Previously, Reena was the VP of content strategy and planning at Warner Media’s HBO Max across all genres. Prior to HBO Max, Reena was the SVP of digital programming strategy and content planning at Nickelodeon. Reena is based in New York City and lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two children.

Naomi Seligman ’55 has had a distinctive career as a thought leader in the continuously disruptive field of computing and related information technology. She remains a senior partner at Ostriker von Simson and, until recently, directed the CIO Strategy Exchange, a private sector “think tank” that regularly brings together four vital quadrants of the computer technology sector: Establishment CEOs from the most important deep-technology hardware and software companies, partners at premier venture capitalists whose innovative entrepreneurs are relevant to major tech customers, and CIOs of the largest multinational enterprises who sponsor the CIO Strategy Exchange. Naomi was also a co-founder of the Research Board, which conducts technology research sponsored by 100 senior executives from the largest enterprises in North America and Europe. Through four powerful waves of technology, she has been a focal point for an ongoing dialogue between key technology sectors. Naomi has also served on 17 corporate boards, including both large and small technology companies, as well as Dun and Bradstreet and Wiley. She currently serves on the Board of Oracle and recently retired from the Akamai board. She chairs the Governance Committee of the School of American Ballet, was Vice Chair of New Leaders for New Schools, and serves on the Cornell-Technion Advisory Committee. She was a trustee of the Computer Museum and the Committee of 200. Naomi received a BA with high honors from Vassar College and a graduate degree in economics from the London School of Economics.