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Pacheco, based in the Department of Computer Science, earned the 2024 Dr. Evelyn Hooker Advocacy Award presented by the Out in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (oSTEM) organization at CU Boulder. oSTEM honors one faculty member or teaching assistant of the campus community annually who has inspired LGBTQ+ students through mentorship or research to flourish in STEM.

“Maria has been advocating to create a safe and welcoming environment for her students,” a statement from the oSTEM executive board said. “We are honored to give Maria the recognition she deserves for supporting the LGBTQ+ community on campus.” 

Pacheco, although early in her tenured-track career, has already left an impactful mark on the students she serves. One of her students, Juan Vasquez, received mentorship even before he began his PhD journey. 

“Dr. Pacheco supported me as a queer Latin American student in academia,” said Vasquez, “and she offered specific advice about how to face some particular issues I might encounter given my particular identity.” 

That advice helped him land several PhD offers and grants, and now as one of her lab students, he sees how he’s improved as a researcher. Pacheco understands that queer PhD students come from diverse backgrounds and face unique challenges, and is always discussing how she can better support them, he notes.

“Her openness to diversity makes her an incredible asset to academia. True mentors foster their mentees’ strengths while also celebrating their unique identities,” said Vasquez. 

Service through leadership

“My own motto is essentially to get involved so we can empower each other in our communities,” said Pacheco. “As a LGBTQ person myself, sometimes just serving in professional spaces is helpful for students.”

Pacheco, who wanted to be part of a queer community interested in AI/ML issues, first became connected with the organization as a graduate student at Purdue University. 

Queer in AI is a global grassroots organization that raises awareness of queer issues in AI/ML through a community of queer scientists. She recommends any student who wants to connect to join their Slack group through where they can pitch ideas for workshops, bounce ideas for research opportunities, raise funds for conferences and network with industry and NGOs. 

Pacheco is chairing the diversity and inclusion committee at the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL) taking place in Mexico City this summer, where she will provide support for the Latinx in AI and Queer in AI affinity groups. She expressed excitement since this is the first time the conference is being hosted in Latin America and expects strong participation from Latin American institutions. 

She encourages students to submit their work in progress to affinity group workshops like , and Queer in AI, which are usually co-located with these larger, wider conferences like the NAACL and the International Conference on Machine Learning. She said it can be a welcoming and supporting environment for early career students and a stepping stone to publishing in the main conference.

Even if students are not ready to present, Pacheco hopes students can participate in conferences to connect and receive feedback from researchers in their community and meet people who share similar identities. 

Inclusive advocacy

Through Pacheco’s collective leadership with other Queer in AI organizers, the group has focused on making professional conferences more inclusive. Conference organizers have laid out guidelines to add pronouns to name tags and publications. Her fellow organizers are starting to tackle the high costs for attending the conferences, a major pressure point for students and the community.

She maintains inclusive practices by hiring graduate students in her lab who belong to the LGBTQ+ community where individuals from many different communities can feel supported. 

Then, there’s her research group, the . BLAST explores queer topics that are not usually  at the forefront of research, but because she recruits students with diverse interests and backgrounds. 

Her students draw from their personal experiences to inform their natural language processing research focusing in areas like education, media and journalism and views on economy at the national level. 

Vazquez, her PhD student, is interested in going beyond hate speech detection and diving into the linguistic patterns of what constitutes hateful speech against LGBTQ+ folks and how it can be weaponized against vulnerable populations in Mexico. 

“When you show up and start meeting folks, you start to band together with individuals who have shared interests,” said Pacheco, who is now one of the for the group. 

Core organizers are researchers, graduate students or individuals from industry who are passionate about AI/ML who have academic backgrounds in computer science, engineering, robotics and neuroscience, among others. 

Pacheco, who is in her first year as a faculty member, is balancing the role as an assistant professor, researcher, advocate and mentor. 

“I think sometimes it’s hard because it feels like a lot of the service falls on us as well,” she said, “but at the same time, it is very rewarding to create these spaces for both yourself, peers and students, so I’d say it’s really worth it.”

About the Dr. Evelyn Hooker Advocacy Award

oSTEM presents the Dr. Evelyn Hooker Advocacy Award to commemorate an individual’s work and emphasize the importance of advocacy. Nominees are selected by CU Boulder students and alumni, and the winner will be selected by a diverse board of staff from the BOLD Center, Center of Inclusion and Social Change and the College of Arts and Sciences.