Fay Cobb Payton to Deliver Keynote at 2024 Minority Serving - Cyberinfrastructure Consortium Annual Meeting

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Apr 25, 2024, 11:10 ET

Award-winning researcher and STEM thought leader will deliver the closing keynote at the second MS-CC annual meeting

WASHINGTON, April 25, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- Fay Cobb Payton — award-winning researcher, international speaker, and entrepreneur — will deliver the closing keynote at the 2024 Annual Meeting for the Minority Serving - Cyberinfrastructure Consortium (MS-CC), May 29-31, in Washington, D.C.

The keynote, "The Importance of Inclusive Cyberinfrastructure," will be held at 11:45 a.m. ET on Friday, May 31, at the Mayflower Hotel.

Research Expansion at Minority-Serving Institutions
Payton is a visiting scholar of inclusive innovation at Rutgers University - Newark and a professor emerita of information technology and analytics at North Carolina State University.

Previously, Payton completed a rotation as program director at the National Science Foundation (NSF), where she initiated the CISE Minority Serving Institution Research Expansion Program, and her tenure was recognized with the NSF Director's Award.

Payton worked on several initiatives at NSF, including Smart Health and Biomedical Research in the Era of Artificial Intelligence and Advanced Data Science; AI Fairness, Equity, Accountability, and Transparency; and Research Expansion and Cloud Computing with partnerships with Amazon, Google, and Microsoft.

A Voice for Change and Inclusion
Payton is the author of Leveraging Intersectionality: Seeing and Not Seeing, and she has published over 150 peer-reviewed journal articles, conference publications, and book chapters on topics such as data quality, AI bias and ethics, healthcare, and innovation.

She is a member of two National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine efforts: the Committee on Women in Science, Engineering, and Medicine, and the dissemination team for the Consensus Study on Transforming Trajectories: Women of Color in Tech.

Payton has a bachelor's degree in industrial and systems engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology, a bachelor's degree in accounting (minor in mathematics) and a master's in business administration from Clark Atlanta University, and a doctorate in information and decision systems from Case Western Reserve University.

Second Annual Meeting
The MS-CC Annual Meetings are gatherings of peers, practitioners, community-builders, advocates, and leaders from historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), tribal colleges and universities (TCUs), Hispanic-serving institutions (HSIs), and the broader community of minority-serving institutions (MSIs).

It is a once-a-year opportunity to come together and create a space where HBCUs and TCUs lead the conversation around sustainable campus-level IT capabilities for data-intensive education and research programs.

The MS-CC Annual Meetings are made possible thanks to support and funding from the National Science Foundation under awards #2137123 and #2234326.

About the Minority Serving – Cyberinfrastructure Consortium (MS-CC)
We envision a transformational consortium that promotes advanced cyberinfrastructure (CI) and advanced technologies for teaching, learning, research, and enterprise technology capabilities at historically under-resourced HBCUs, TCUs, HSIs, and MSIs. We seek to lift participating institutions by advancing technology infrastructure for research and education. We will contribute the unique voices, cultural identities, and interests of our community to research and education nationally and beyond.

The MS-CC in partnership with Internet2 received funding from the National Science Foundation to support this vision. Nearly $3 million over two years to fund a Cyberinfrastructure Center of Excellence Pilot in 2021 (NSF Award # 2137123), and nearly 15 million over five years to support accelerating cyberinfrastructure-centric research capacity at HBCUs and TCUs through proof-of-concept grants and shared resources in 2022 (NSF Award # 2234326). The MS-CC has also been awarded nearly $2.5 million NSF supplement to develop the MS-CC Collaboratory in Climate Science. The consortium emerged from a pilot project funded by the National Science Foundation through Clemson University (NSF Award #1659297).

SOURCE Internet2