Kathy McKeown

Kathleen R. McKeown is the Henry and Gertrude Rothschild Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University and is also the Founding Director of the Data Science Institute at Columbia. She served as the Director from July 2012 - June 2017. She served as Department Chair from 1998-2003 and as Vice Dean for Research for the School of Engineering and Applied Science for two years. McKeown received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Pennsylvania in 1982 and has been at Columbia since then. Her research interests include text summarization, natural language generation, multi-media explanation, question-answering and multi-lingual applications.

In 1985 she received a National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award, in 1991 she received a National Science Foundation Faculty Award for Women, in 1994 she was selected as a AAAI Fellow, in 2003 she was elected as an ACM Fellow, and in 2012 she was selected as one of the Founding Fellows of the Association for Computational Linguistics. In 2010, she received the Anita Borg Women of Vision Award in Innovation for her work on text summarization. McKeown is also quite active nationally. She has served as President, Vice President, and Secretary-Treasurer of the Association of Computational Linguistics. She has also served as a board member of the Computing Research Association and as secretary of the board.