Name Cherri Pancake | ||
Cherri M. Pancake is an ethnographer and computer scientist who works as a professor of electrical engineering and computer science and an Intel Faculty Fellow at Oregon State University, and as the director of the Northwest Alliance for Computational Science & Engineering. She is known for her pioneering work on usability engineering for high performance computing.
Pancake earned a bachelor's degree in environmental design from Cornell University, and then studied anthropology at Louisiana State University. After working for the Peace Corps in Peru, she spent ten years in Guatemala studying the Maya peoples; for over six of these years she was curator of the Ixchel Museum of Indigenous Textiles and Clothing. However, the political unrest in Guatemala in the early 1980s caused her to return to the US, where she became a graduate student in engineering at Auburn University, the first woman in the program. She performed the first usability studies of software tools for high performance computing, and found methods of improving the usability of these tools based on her knowledge of color perception, response time, and short-term memory.
Pancake was the conference chair of the 1999 ACM/IEEE Supercomputing Conference. She was elected as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery in 2001 "for leadership contributions to usability to high performance computing tools", and became a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2003. She was honored as one of the Oregon Women of Achievement in 2006.