Lenore Blum, Distinguished Career Professor of Computer Science, received the inaugural Dean's Professorship in Technology Entrepreneurship at a May 3 ceremony and celebration.

Blum is the founding director of Project Olympus, an incubator that helps Carnegie Mellon University students and faculty assess the commercial prospects of their ideas and research findings, and begin the process of establishing a startup. She also is the faculty director of the campus-wide Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship.

"Lenore has driven several career's worth of impact on the School of Computer Science," said Tom Mitchell, interim dean of SCS. "We are profoundly grateful for all that she has done for SCS and CMU."

Blum is internationally recognized for her work in increasing the participation of girls and women in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) fields. She was a founder of the Association for Women in Mathematics and the Expanding Your Horizons Network. At Carnegie Mellon, she founded the Women@SCS program. In 2004, she received the U.S. Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring. In 2009 she received the Carnegie Science Catalyst Award in recognition of her work with Project Olympus and of her efforts to increase the participation of women in computer science.

Her research, founding a theory of computation and complexity over continuous domains, forms a theoretical basis for scientific computation. She is a trustee of the Jewish Healthcare Foundation, on the board of hackNY, on the advisory board of WorldQuantU, and faculty advisor to the CMU student organization, ScottyLabs.