ATLAS Ph.D. student Heather Underwood has won the first-place graduate student award in the prestigious Grand Finals of the 2013 Student Research Competition (SRC) of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for her research paper entitled “The PartoPen: Using Digital Pen Software to Improve Birth Attendant Training and Maternal Outcomes in Kenya.”
Underwood is developing the PartoPen, which is an interactive digital pen-based system that reinforces birth-attendant training, records labor progress, validates form data, and overall aims to improve maternal outcomes in developing countries. Student research competition winners from all ACM conferences from the past year were entered in the Grand Finals.
A total of about 200 students participated in all the student research competitions. Underwood received a first-place ranking in the student research competition for this paper at the CHI 2012 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems held last May.
She will be recognized at the ACM awards banquet June 15 in San Francisco. Underwood’s research is supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship and a Bill & Melinda Gates Global Challenge Grant.
The ACM Student Research Competition is made possible by a generous sponsorship from Microsoft Research.