Meet the 2023 Internet2 Inclusivity Scholarship Recipients

Celebrating Professional Women in IT

We are pleased to share the winners of the 2023 Internet2 Inclusivity (I2I) Scholarship, which is centered on increasing the meaningful participation of women information technology professionals in the research and education (R&E) community.

Shweta Chauhan

Shweta Chauhan graduated from San Diego State University  in December 2022 with a bachelor’s degree in computer science. Initially employed as a technology student assistant in Instructional Technology Services (ITS), Shweta garnered valuable experience by contributing to my.SDSU – the official online portal for admissions, records, financial aid, and more – reconfiguring it within Omni CMS during its transition phase.

Post-graduation, Shweta secured a full-time role as a faculty support specialist in ITS. In this capacity, Shweta offers tier 1 and 2 technical support for learning environments and the Faculty Instructional Technology (FIT) Center. She thrives in enhancing the learning environment using cutting-edge technology, assisting faculty with tech resources, coordinating the backend on the Mediasite portal through recording logistics and administration, providing training, and proficiently troubleshooting issues.

Shweta also pioneers instructional and research applications that leverage technology to elevate academic goals. An intriguing aspect of Shweta is her fluency in six languages and her ambitious pursuit of a graduate degree in cybersecurity.

Emily Kasbohm

Emily Kasbohm is a senior web developer working for Brown University’s Office of Information Technology (OIT) in Providence, RI. Originally from New Jersey, she first came to Brown as an undergraduate student and earned her bachelor’s degree in computer science in 2018.

After graduation, she chose to stay at Brown as a full-time staff member on OIT’s Web Services team. As an alumna, she is deeply committed to the university’s mission “to serve the community, the nation, and the world by discovering, communicating, and preserving knowledge and understanding in a spirit of free inquiry, and by educating and preparing students to discharge the offices of life with usefulness and reputation.”

Her work with OIT ranges from automating website maintenance workflows to application development to supporting faculty, staff, and student users. She loves to work as part of a team, whether through pair programming, mentoring undergraduate interns, or simply brainstorming innovative software solutions. Outside of work, she enjoys cooking, crafting, and books with happy endings.

Becca Kingery

Becca Kingery is the education IT manager for the Nebraska Office of the CIO. In that role she provides administrative leadership for Network Nebraska. Network Nebraska is a collaborative statewide networking effort under the guidance of the Nebraska Information Technology Commission (NITC) to share telecommunications resources, network services, and applications among K-12, higher education entities, libraries, and other educational organizations. Together, these educational entities work to provide a scalable, reliable, and affordable infrastructure capable of carrying a spectrum of services and applications.

In addition to her work with Network Nebraska, she also oversees the NITC Education Council which acts as a catalyst to encourage educational organizations from all over the state to work together for the common good. The NITC Education Council develops strategies, action items, and future initiatives to improve educational technology through the state of Nebraska. Despite being relatively new to the IT professional world, Becca has a shared passion of connecting schools and providing Nebraska with the best tools available. In pursuit of continued professional development, she has recently begun coursework in project management.

Jessica Krause

Jessica Krause is a reporting analyst at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She joined the Administration & Finance IT Department in 2014 as a security and identity management administrator and transitioned to her current position in 2017. Jessica received her Lean Six Sigma Green Belt Certification in 2018 and has always been passionate about business process improvement.

Her background in business administration management and information security has greatly helped in realizing the importance of different perspectives when evaluating IT solutions. One of the most rewarding aspects of Jessica’s position is being able to assist colleagues and faculty with technology or reporting solutions that enable them to provide better support to their customers and students.

Jessica works with all types of data and systems, including finance, utility, campus space, ecommerce, and event management. In her free time, Jessica enjoys horseback riding, hiking with her dog, and bowling.

Ayat Mohammed

Ayat Mohammed is a computational scientist in Advanced Research Computing (ARC) at Virginia Tech. ARC is a unit within the Division of Information Technology at Virginia Tech that provides high-performance computing (HPC) resources, large-scale storage, high-end visualization capabilities, and computational science expertise to the university’s research community.

Her current role is a user-facing computational scientist with a focus on visualization. She received her Ph.D. in computer science from Virginia Tech in 2017. While at Virginia Tech, she served as a graduate research assistant with ARC working primarily on visualization support for research. She conducted research in bioinformatics and served as a teaching assistant in the Computer Science Department.

She gained more valuable experience as a postdoctoral fellow at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) and at the Dell Medical School at the University of Texas at Austin. She also taught computer science classes at UT Austin and Ain Shams University in Egypt, and she conducted research at the Ain Shams Virtual Hospital. She has published nine journal or conference papers on her research and has been active in presenting her research at conferences in her field.

Ayat has been an active member of her professional community. She was a student volunteer with XSEDE and at the Supercomputing Conference in 2016. She is an Egyptian “Ambassador” for the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society, on the steering committee for the 2023 Web3D Conference, and an editorial board member for the Journal of Linguistics and Education Research.

Veronica Ramirez

Veronica Ramirez is a risk and vulnerability analyst at Chapman University located in Orange, CA. She joined the Information Security team in early 2023 and assists with the day-to-day operations related to risk and vulnerability management.

Veronica started her career at Chapman University’s Service Desk in 2019 and received her master’s degree in cybersecurity in December 2021.