Jeané Blunt, IT Communications Specialist
Congratulations to Senior Business Systems Analyst, Andrea Lloyd, for being selected to represent UC Berkeley in Women Rock IT for 2023. Every year UC Women in Technology (UC WIT) recognizes the outstanding contributions of women in IT across the UC System in the Women Rock IT article, published by the UC IT Blog. This year, UC WIT representatives and their campus colleagues from every UC location selected one woman from each campus for recognition. Learn about the bIT women nominated this year, and their stories, that serve as a testament to the thousands of women who are driving and supporting IT that underpins the UC Mission.
Andrea Lloyd, Senior Business Systems Analyst
Andrea has transformed the university and the higher ed community through her work with automated electronic forms. Over 70 paper forms have been replaced with ~25 eForms, saving the campus $1.5M+. She handles complex challenges with eForms in a timely manner; for example, in response to the recent UAW labor action, Andrea streamlined an existing eForm, saving advising and registrar staff over 500 hours of manual effort. Andrea is building at least four new eForms this year, including one that will automate the process of checking the myriad of rules for graduate students requesting employment and funding exceptions. Furthermore, Andrea was a driving force in establishing an international eForm community of practice and consults with universities and other organizations around the world.
Meet Other Women Who Rock IT Across Campus
The following women were also nominated by colleagues across our campus One IT community for their exemplary work.
Amina Kirby, AV IT Engineer
Since starting as the Media Services Specialist last summer, Amina was quickly promoted to the AV IT Engineer position shortly after - due to her keen technical skills and knowledge. She dove right into learning the new QSC room systems and went through their certification training in order to tailor our systems to our preferences and needs. She has been focused and determined to provide excellent service to our community and collaborates with our team on important decisions, planning upgrades and managing our classroom iPads.
Sanghamithra Bandi, Data Architect and Interim Manager of Data Analytics
Mithra has led various initiatives in data with a positive team impact, with a focus on operational excellence and customer experience. She also holds everyone accountable for their actions and behaviors. She addresses any incidents of discrimination or harassment quickly and effectively, and strives to create a safe and pleasant workspace for everyone.
Rebecca Long, Course Evaluations and Gradescope Service Lead
Becca manages Berkeley’s online course evaluations service, which distributes 350,000+ evaluations annually. In 2022, she worked closely with the DevOps team to develop a platform to manage the timing and distribution of course evaluations. Becca contributed to designing a functional and elegant user interface, conducted user acceptance testing, troubleshot bugs, and trained users. The tool—used by administrators from 80 campus departments—received rave reviews and has greatly reduced support tickets, resulting in fewer courses that are erroneously omitted from evaluation. This amazing collaboration resulted in a practical, robust tool that will serve nearly all campus departments for years to come.
Rita Rosenthal, Director of Communications
Rita has grown a team that's doubled the impact and output of the Berkeley IT Communications team. She has taken on a large role in the UC Tech conference and continues to volunteer her time to several projects across campus and the UC system. She is an advocate for women in technology and has continually spread this message in her work and in the development of her team.
Sally Baker, BTSA II
Sally’s leadership during the COVID-19 pandemic has been crucial in ensuring the continuity of IT services at UC Berkeley. With no lead or assistant manager, she has managed a team of over 20 employees with remarkable efficiency. Her contribution to the university's technological infrastructure is invaluable, and her urgency in addressing the challenges posed by the pandemic is commendable. Her leadership during the challenges of COVID-19 is a true testament to her determination and resilience. Her achievement is amazing, and her impact is immeasurable.
Kelly Chang, Classroom Help Desk Coordinator & Natalie Montañez, Instructional Technology Supervisor
In the course of the last three years, Natalie and Kelly, in addition to their other roles, have self-led an initiative to build and improve the experience for one of the largest student workforces in bIT to become one that is a professional, supportive, and an enriching learning space for student employees. As they standardize and improve their workforce by developing training programs and knowledge bases, the team has been able to provide a higher quality of service while also providing a deeper sense of community and duty for student employees in RTL.
Along with creating a robust schedule of team-building events throughout the semester, the duo will soon be adding a professional development series to provide specialized attention for the professional and personal aspirations of marginalized students. Collectively, these efforts fulfill both a business need and, just as importantly, uplift the campus community.
Wan Nurul Naszeerah, Domain Consultant
Wan works in Research IT and is also a PhD Student in Public Health. She absolutely rocked at helping make the Women in Data Science Berkeley a success! Wan was a featured panel speaker in 2022 and is the main Research IT representative on the 2023 planning committee. This group cuts across many campus roles and departments and has a huge impact. Thank you Wan for helping raise the voices of women and other underrepresented groups in the field of data science.
Lynne Grigsby, Division Head of Library IT
Lynne is a leader not only in the Berkeley Library, but provides high level strategic IT guidance in Library software and applications for the entire UC. Lynne is currently the chair of the Systemwide Integrated Library System (ILS) Leadership Group, IS3 Lead for the Library and oversees Library applications, infrastructure, and digital imaging. Through Lynne's career at Berkeley, she has cultivated a culture shift in the Library through advocacy of the user experience and inclusive collaboration.
Anne Lyttle, Application Developer
Anne's been a core member of our development team for years, playing a crucial role in the behind-the-scenes integrations that keep campus services like bCourses, Course Capture and Course Evaluations running. Apart from her technical contributions I want to highlight her recent achievements in addressing questions of equity and bias in our work. On her own initiative she's taken a lead role in establishing accessibility best practices across our project work, and she's also researched and presented on questions of algorithmic bias relevant to our emerging work in analytics and data science.
Erin Foster, Research Data Management Service Lead
Erin rocks at leading successful Love Data Week events! Thanks to Erin’s important contributions, these events moved from being planned by and offered to the UC Berkeley campus to all the UC campuses being involved. Now, we work together to offer a coordinated series of events that is open to all campuses which greatly increases our impact. We offer many events throughout the week and each one reaches many more than 100 registrants which makes them one of Research IT’s most impactful events that we offer. Thank you, Erin!
Kathleen Lu, Web Platform Manager
Kathleen has pulled a magic trick for the last 10 years with her team's offering, Open Berkeley. The service has about 97% retention rate, and has grown from 30 sites in 2012 to over 270 in 2023 with no increase in staffing of her 3-member group, all while the service is based on recharge. Open Berkeley was an idea that dawned on Kathleen as she performed her duties, working on websites as part of her job in another unit more than a decade ago. It has grown to a robust platform that addresses the needs of accessibility, branding, privacy, and security (four pillars) behind the scenes and with no impact or action from their customers.
Sparky Carranza, Security Video
Over her nine-year tenure, and with very few resources, Sparky created a security video program that encompasses all of campus, to keep all students, visitors, faculty and staff safe. This program provides supporting video to document incidents, which helps with making stronger cases against the criminal activity we see today.
Irene Walsh, Project and Release Manager
Over her five-year tenure, Irene has brought considerable skill in requirements analysis and project management. But when our team found itself with no supervisor, no director, and in fact no leader except the CIO herself, she stepped up and took on that additional responsibility.Irene served as Interim Manager for EIS for a year (plus several months, unofficially, before and after that) with no experience in technical management, UC personnel and finance processes, or campus management culture–yet she has since become expert at them all. Irene has made herself a leader.
Kellsie A. Adams-Briesch, DNS Administrator
Not only is Kellsie the DNS administrator at UC Berkeley, a vital role in regards to the UC Berkeley’s IP Network, she’ll also triage incidents for the Network Team. Everytime anyone on campus needs her, she is always helpful, with a great attitude.
Laurie Graham
Laurie was hired by UCB in 2013 to manage the Production Control Shared Service Center, and led the transition of UCB, UCOP, and UCSF from multiple tools and manual batch processes to one standard, fully automated approach. She led her team through multiple successful implementations as each campus transitioned off their HR systems onto this UC standard system. As the capstone of her efforts, Laurie collaborated with UCOP to merge PCSSC with the UCOP EOC and transition the work back to UCOP/ESS, where the service currently resides. She now manages the Data Management team in bIT/DPS responsible for Storage, Backup, and Database Services and actively promotes "Women in IT" through her lived experience.
Read Women Rock IT to learn more about women across the UC system who are rocking IT!
