Newswise — Google Vice President of Search Products and User Experience Marissa Mayer will deliver the commencement address at Illinois Institute of Technology's 2009 ceremony on Saturday, May 16, on IIT's Main Campus.
Google's first female engineer, Mayer joined the company in 1999 to lead the user interface and web server teams. Currently, she leads Google's efforts on search products — web search, images, news, blogs, maps, scholar — and other consumer-facing initiatives, such as Google Earth, Google Books, iGoogle, and Google Chrome. Marissa's contributions include leading the design of Google's homepage and simple search interface, which has been internationalized to over 100 languages across 150 countries. Several patents have been filed on Mayer's work in interface design and artificial intelligence.
Along with her full-time work at Google, Mayer has taught introductory computer programming classes at Stanford University, where she earned both her B.S. in Symbolic Systems and her M.S. in Computer Science with a specialization in artificial intelligence. Stanford has recognized Mayer with the Centennial Teaching Award and the Forsythe Award for her outstanding contribution to undergraduate education.
Prior to joining Google, Mayer worked at the UBS research lab (Ubilab) in Zurich, Switzerland, and at SRI International in Menlo Park, California. She has been featured in various publications, including being named one of "10 Tech Leaders of the Future" by Newsweek and one of the "50 Most Powerful Women" by Fortune. Additionally, Red Herring named her one of "15 Women to Watch" and Business 2.0 called her part of the "Silicon Valley Dream Team."
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