The IEEE Frances B. Hugle Scholarship was established to honor the memory of Frances B. Hugle, her many significant engineering accomplishments, and to help provide the resources for female engineers to follow in her footsteps. The scholarship is presented to up to two female IEEE Student Members who have completed two years of undergraduate study in an engineering curriculum at an ABET-accredited university or college within the United States.
2020 Recipient
Olivia Figueira, IEEE Student Member
Olivia Figueira is a senior at Santa Clara University majoring in Computer Science and Engineering and minoring in Mathematics and Economics. She will graduate in June 2021 with her Bachelor’s degree and hopes to pursue a PhD in Computer Science to research in the intersection of computer security and privacy and human-computer interaction (HCI). Olivia has participated in the Computing Research Association’s Committee on Widening Participation (CRA-WP) Distributed Research Experience for Undergraduates (DREU) program for two summers, one at the University of Washington and one at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and both experiences helped spark her interest in attending graduate school to conduct research in this field. After her DREU program at the University of Washington, she presented preliminary results of her research at the 2019 Grace Hopper Celebration Conference as a CRA-WP GHC Research Scholar.
Olivia is a member of the Santa Clara University Honors Program, and she has been a member of the Tau Beta Pi Engineering Honor Society since her junior year. She currently serves as President of the Santa Clara University chapter of Tau Beta Pi, and this is her second year serving as the Lead Peer Advisor for her university’s School of Engineering Peer Advising Program, which provides individual mentorship and advising to new engineering students as they navigate their first year at Santa Clara University. She also served on the board of the Association for Computing Machinery Women’s Chapter (ACM-W) at her university as First-Year Representative for one year and Co-President for two years. For her work in ACM-W, she received the 2018-2019 Upsilon Pi Epsilon ACM Student Chapter Scholarship, which recognizes academic achievement and professional commitment within ACM student chapters.
In all her leadership and volunteering positions, Olivia has always worked towards the inclusion and empowerment of women and underrepresented minorities in engineering to help motivate them to continue in engineering as her advisors and mentors did for her. She is grateful for the guidance she has received from her mentors throughout her undergraduate career and plans to continue to engage with organizations such as IEEE WIE, CRA-WP, and ACM-W in her future career to further widen participation in engineering.
The IEEE Women in Engineering committee takes pleasure in presenting Olivia Figueira as the 2020 recipient of the Frances B. Hugle Scholarship, in recognition of her outstanding academic performance and passion for engineering.