Lucy Sanders


Lucinda "Lucy" Sanders is the current CEO and a co-founder of the National Center for Women & Information Technology. She is the recipient of many distinguished honors in the STEM fields, including induction into the US News STEM Leadership Hall of Fame in 2013.

Early age and education

At an early age, Sanders displayed an interest in the STEM fields. Sanders had three main influences that led her to pursue an education in computer science: her father, her high school math teacher, and her sister. Her father was an early adopter of computer science when it first began to develop as a large scale field, her high school teacher taught Sanders skills required for computer programming, and her sister became successful after receiving one of the early degrees in computer science.
Upon graduating from high school, Sanders attended Louisiana State University and received her bachelor's degree in computer science. Sanders then attended the University of Colorado Boulder where she attained a master's degree in computer science.

Professional career

In her early career, Sanders worked as a Research and Development Manager at Bell Labs. She later became an executive vice president and worked as the CTO of Lucent Customer Care Solutions until 1999. She moved on from Bell Labs to work at Inc CRM Solutions at Avaya Labs for two years, until she founded the National Center for Women and Information Technology in 2004, where she currently works as the CEO.
She also previously held a position in the board of the Alliance for Technology, Learning, and Society, the Denver Public Schools Computer Magnet Advisory Board, the MSRI, the Engineering Advisory Council at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and is a Trustee for the Center for American Entrepreneurship and the International Computer Science Institute.

NCWIT

Sanders initially co-founded the National Center for Women & Information Technology in 2004, when she was given a grant from the National Science Foundation. Along with Telle Whitney and Robert Schnabel, Sanders hoped to use NCWIT to increase the number of women in computer fields. Sanders is currently working as the day to day CEO of the National Center for Women & Information Technology.

Publications