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Women in IT

“If you know that you like solving problems and have a tendency to not give up until you find a reasonable answer, you should definitely give computer science and data analysis a try!”
Solmaz's biography

Solmaz Shahalizadeh is a data scientist and software developer. She obtained her BSc. in Computer Science from the University of Tehran, Iran and worked as a database and web developer for a couple of years before starting her graduate studies. She obtained a masters of science in Engineering from Chalmers Technical University in Sweden . As part of her thesis she worked on modelling the multiple drug resistance problem as multiple perturbation inside a cell using neural networks. Afterwards, she moved to Canada, where she did a masters in computer science with focus on bioinformatics at McGill university. Her thesis project was on using machine learning and statistical analysis to develop predictors of breast cancer outcome by employing gene expression data which resulted in a patent application. Afterwards she joined Morgan Stanley as a technology associate in the profit and loss reporting team and was involved with various Finance-IT projects as an application and database developer. While at Morgan Stanley, she was actively involved with diversity recruitment and won a firm-wide award for her efforts in that area.

Solmaz has recently joined Shopify as a data scientist and is currently working on using the available product data to help make Shopify merchants more successful.

I am a Research Associate and Adjunct Lecturer at Queen’s University in Kingston, ON. My main research focus has been on autonomic computing which involves developing control mechanisms to allow computer systems to react to changes in their environment (such as changes in workload or hardware configuration) in much the same way as the human autonomic nervous system – that is, without conscious effort or human intervention. We have applied this concept in different domains including database management systems, web services and cloud computing. I am also the project manager for a multi-university research project on Delivering Ultra-large Scale Services. My teaching load includes courses in both the School of Computing and the Faculty of Education. I teach an introduction to programming course where I have adopted a “hands-on” approach so that students learn in the lab as opposed to the classroom. This course was also offered on-line last summer for the first time. This year I have been given the opportunity to teach pre-service teachers about teaching computer science in secondary schools.

The amount of data available these days, on really anything, is fascinating. We can learn a lot about ourselves and the way we interact with the rest of the world by tapping into these streams of data: they may initially seem irrelevant but then reveal something truly informative. I enjoy making sense of this data and figuring out a bigger picture.

I was a big math fan during high school and doing computer science at undergrad level was more like a natural extension to that. I also liked the fact that knowing computers and math well would allow me to get into many more fields since these are useful skills in many other areas.

I think if you know that you like solving problems and have a tendency to not give up until you find a reasonable answer, you should definitely give computer science and data analysis a try! Learn a programming language and try to code solutions to what is interesting to you, this can be anything from finding the best price on a pair of shoes you are eyeing or resolving an issue in an open source software. This way you’ll gain the required skills and on the way you are more then likely to find communities (online and offline) of like-minded people working on interesting ideas. To me, that is the definition of a fulfilling career: to work with smart people on interesting problems!

I like reading books and blogs, not always technical ones. I also try to do running in the summer and hot yoga in the winter.

 

Through outreach and professional development activities, research, partnerships, thought leadership and online initiatives, we work with industry and academia to educate on the value of diversity for innovation, to inspire women to thrive and to celebrate the contributions of women in science and engineering.
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