Kirsten Smith
Labs Manager and Technology Officer and Associate Director of CICS
Kirsten Duesterdick Smith is the associate director, technology officer and labs manager at the Center for Information and Communication Sciences (CICS) at Ball State University. CICS is a graduate program at the intersection of technology and business.
As associate director, she participates in strategic and tactical plans for the health and growth of the unit and advices all incoming students. As technology officer and labs manager, she schedules and trains graduate assistants, provides faculty support by developing labs for a variety of classes, advises student projects, and oversees testing. Kirsten is the director of and faculty advisor to the Software Testing Institute (STI) within CICS, working with industry partners on usability and other issues.
Kirsten also chairs the Women Working in Technology (WWiT) initiative at Ball State. Founded in 2008, WWiT focuses on providing professional and personal development opportunities for women working in technology and emerging media fields. The WWiT initiative also focuses on girls in technology with mentoring and career exploration opportunities for undergraduate women and K-12 girls. The goal is to encourage girls into STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) education and careers.
Her current grant from the Cisco Networking Academy is creating IT workshops for middle and high school girls. These workshops will be packaged and shared at no cost to any organizations who wish to promote IT concepts and careers to girls. Past grants on which Ms. Smith has been either PI or co-PI include multiple grants through the Software Engineering Research Center (SERC) developing an expert reviewer usability tool (2003 – 2006), multiple emerging media grants for work on various interactive TV and mobile applications (2008, 2009, 2010), and a grant from Channel One to help develop an internet protocol-based emergency alert system (2010- 2011).
Kirsten is a member of the User Experience Professionals Association, the Project Management Institute, and the Association of IT Professionals. She is on the Leadership Board of the Indiana Girls Collaborative Project.
She has a master of science in information and communication sciences from Ball State and a bachelor of arts in theater from George Mason University.