Take a look at this! What you are looking at – currently under construction – is the ATLAS Center, soon to be home to most of the core staff of the National Center for Women & Information Technology. In fact, the NCWIT “cluster” is directly inside the center and right curved second story windows that you see in the bottom left portion of the image, just to the left of the small balcony. The ATLAS Center is a new building at the heart of the University of Colorado at Boulder campus that will open in August 2006. The ATLAS (Alliance for Technology, Learning and Society) Institute, along with the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology, are the founding and core organizations of NCWIT. Lucy Sanders, CEO of NCWIT, joined ATLAS as its executive in residence and industry and outreach director in 2001 after an illustrious 25 career with Bell/Lucent/Avaya Labs; she had been a member of the ATLAS Executive Advisory Board prior to joining ATLAS. The NCWIT cluster in the ATLAS Center will consist of private and shared office space for five people, a large shared common area for students and additional staff, and additional student space across the hall. Adjoining it are a small conference room and a board room with videoconferencing capability, which will be very useful for in-house and remote NCWIT meetings. Most of all, there will be space for visitors in a beautiful and exciting new building, that also hosts classrooms, performance and production studios, a screening room, an auditorium, an exhibition space, and the ATLAS curricular and research programs including its evaluation and research group. So we hope the many people affiliated with NCWIT will visit us at the ATLAS Center starting this fall. And, all the participants in the May 2007 semi-annual NCWIT national meeting will get to see the ATLAS Center, as the meeting will be held there.
NCWIT Co-founder Dr. Bobby Schnabel is Vice Provost for Academic and CAmpus Technology and founding director of the ATLAS Institute at the University of Colorado, Boulder.