APPLICATIONS

BALTIMORE--The SC2002 Education Program will be dedicated to the memory of Mary Ellen Verona, Ph.D., who died Oct. 7 at age 56, after a long battle with breast cancer. A short dedication ceremony will take place during the opening of the Education Program at 8:30 a.m. Saturday, Nov. 16. Verona's family will be on hand to accept a framed memento honoring the longtime Maryland educator. Verona was founder of the Maryland Virtual High School of Science and Mathematics, a coalition of high schools in Maryland linked via dedicated Internet connections, which are used to conduct experiments, research topics, and collaborate with other students and teachers. Verona was also a principal investigator with the Education, Outreach, and Training Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (EOT-PACI), the education and outreach component of the National Science Foundation's PACI program, and a computer science, mathematics, and science teacher in the Montgomery County Public Schools for more than 15 years. "Mary Ellen will be remembered as a visionary, who saw very early on the value of online collaboration, modeling software, and computer visualization as tools in teaching science," said Roscoe Giles, general chair of SC2002 and team leader of EOT-PACI. "She will be greatly missed by her colleagues and her students, however, through this dedication, she will be remembered by all of us who believe in improving the quality of math and science education and in merging real science with real teaching," added Scott Lathrop, co-chair of the SC2002 Education Program. The SC Education Program brings more than 140 undergraduate faculty and K-12 teachers to the SC conference, the world's largest and most prestigious high performance computing and networking conference. These educators spend four days in hands-on workshops, where they learn how to incorporate computing tools and applications into their classroom math and science curricula. The educators receive support throughout the year as they work to incorporate the appropriate tools into their courses. In addition to the dedication, numerous people have worked together to establish the Mary Ellen Verona Memorial Award to recognize teachers with Verona's pioneering spirit and commitment to using modeling and visualization tools to broaden their own and their students' learning experiences.