UCI Giving Day 2020

Today, we are raising funds for the Rosalva Gallardo Valencia Graduate Student Award in Software Research*, an endowed fund which supports graduate student awards, with a preference given to students who specialize in software research.

About Rosalva Gallardo Valencia

When Rosalva Gallardo Valencia was awarded the Miguel Velez fellowship for Latin American graduate students in 2009, she became a link in a chain that, a decade later, would extend to Adriana Meza Soria, currently a doctoral student in software engineering at UCI.

A Journey from Peru to UCI to Google
Today, Gallardo Valencia is a data analytics program manager for Partner Developer Relations at Google and co-founder of the Network of Professional Peruvians in Science and Technology in Silicon Valley (PeruSV.org). She has led a Google.org collaboration with Laboratoria, an organization that trains low-income Latin American women as front-end developers and UX designers. Before joining Google, Gallardo Valencia was an engineering manager at Intel.

As an inductee into the 2020 ICS Alumni Hall of Fame, she looked into a crowd that included her mother, sister and niece, who had travelled from Peru, and her past Ph.D. adviser, who had travelled from Canada. She spoke of her own journey from working as a software engineer in Peru to studying at UCI. English was not her native language, and although she had received a scholarship to cover her tuition and expenses, money was tight. She talked about how it would take three hours on three different buses just to get from UCI to Ikea; a trip to visit her family in Peru was unthinkable. Yet she persevered.

“It was thanks to the support of my amazing adviser, Susan Sim, [who] offered all the support I needed.” Sim not only helped Gallardo Valencia with her English — they ended up publishing two books together — but Sim also applied for the Miguel Velez fellowship on her student’s behalf. “That was actually a surprise for me,” admits Gallardo Valencia, who explained that the $10,000 fellowship helped in so many ways.  I made a promise to myself that someday,” she told the crowd, “I would return that favor and I would create my own award or scholarship.” In 2019, she fulfilled her promise in 2019 with the Rosalva Gallardo Valencia Graduate Award, whose inaugural recipient, Adriana Meza Soria, was sitting in the audience.

Please join Rosalva and help support the next generation of ICS graduate students!

*If support to this fund does not meet the minimum $50,000 for establishing a named endowed fund, then the name of this endowed fund will remain the "ICS Graduate Student Award in Software Research Endowment" and will be used for the same purposes. If support to this fund meets the $50,000 minimum for establishing a named endowed fund, this fund shall be named the "Rosalva Gallardo Software Research Endowment". In the case that support to this fund exceeds the minimum of $100,000 for establishing a named graduate student award endowment, then the name of this endowed fund shall be the "Rosalva Gallardo Valencia Graduate Student Award in Software Research".