On April 8th, the Women in Data Science (WiDS) Blacksburg Regional Event will be held at Virginia Tech from 3-8:30 pm (ET).  The WiDS Blacksburg inaugural event was first held at Virginia Tech in 2019. The program went virtual in 2020 and after a year's hiatis, the conference returns this year in a hybrid format.

"With a hybrid format this year, we hope to have attendees on campus from Virginia Tech and the Blacksburg community, as well as the New River and Roanoke Valleys.  We would also love to have Virginia Tech alumni join us via Zoom. Students of all ages (from high school to graduate school) will find topics of interest, as will those who have already launched their data science careers.

Anyone with an interest in Data Science is welcome to attend, but you must register by April 5th

This year's program features keynote speakers  Dr. Hoda Eldardiry from Virginia Tech and Dr. Rebecca Hubbard from the University of Pennsylvania. There will also be a Career Panel and evening tutorial sessions with presentations by women who are leaders in the field of data science. All in-person events will be held in the New Classroom Building at Virginia Tech.

WiDS Blacksburg is an independent regional event organized by Virginia Tech as part of the annual WiDS Worldwide conference organized by Stanford University and an estimated 200+ locations worldwide, which features outstanding women doing outstanding work in the field of data science. All genders are invited to attend all WiDS Worldwide conference events. 

WiDS hosts a series of regional events focused primarily on technical aspects and applications of data science, in which all the presenters are women. The goal is to encourage women to pursue careers in data science, and to support them by building a local community of data scientists, helping them develop their skill set and understand more about what it means to apply data science techniques to a variety of challenging problems. 

This event is sponsored by the Academy of Data Sciences and the Computational Modeling and Data Analytics program at Virginia Tech.