Jule Schatz receives WISE Aspire, Advance, Achieve Mentoring Award

CSE PhD candidate Jule Schatz has been selected as a recipient of the 2021 Aspire, Advance, Achieve Mentoring Award. The Mentoring award, one of three Willie Hobbs Moore Awards given annually, recognizes individuals who have served as an outstanding formal or informal mentor to students.

Jule was selected for her outstanding efforts to support undergraduate students in computer science, which has a low proportion of women, and for her commitment to precollege students in the community. 

Jule is the lead GSI for a section of EECS 183, Elementary Programming Concepts, which targets students in the Comprehensive Studies Program who historically haven’t felt as welcome in the computer science community. In this capacity, Jule goes above and beyond when helping her students and doesn’t only focus on the course content but also on helping students feel welcome by designing specific content to encourage a growth mindset and to foster community. Jule also volunteers in a Detroit high school computer science class and helps with the U-M summer educational outreach program AI4ALL (Artificial Intelligence for All).

Jule is interested in modeling human behavior using Soar, a general cognitive architecture used worldwide to develop systems that exhibit intelligent behavior. Her research looks at how to create computer programs that think the way humans do to both learn more about the human brain and develop smarter AI. Her recent work looks at modeling the remote associates task, a word association recall task, using Soar. She hopes to expand on this work in the future to better understand how memory and creativity work in the human brain. 

Jule’s research is funded by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. She is advised by John L. Tishman Professor of Engineering John Laird.

About the Willie Hobbs Moore Awards

In 2013, the University of Michigan Women in Science and Engineering (WISE) office established the annual Willie Hobbs Moore Awards to honor faculty, staff, and students who demonstrate excellence in promoting equity in science, technology, engineering, and math. U-M WISE honors outstanding advocates for diversity, equity, and inclusion in STEM with three awards celebrating the accomplishments of Willie Hobbs Moore, the first African American woman at Michigan to earn a BS and MS in Electrical Engineering and the first African American woman in the country to earn a PhD in physics. These awards are the Willie Hobbs Moore Achievement Award, the Aspire, Advance, Achieve Mentoring Award, and the Claudia Joan Alexander Award.