Some months ago, I spoke at my first conference, and was so excited by the experience that I went researching related conferences. As I dug through the layers of information the Internet helpfully provided, I also noticed one woman showing up repeatedly. She was speaking at many of these conferences, and she looked like she was enjoying the experiences. I became a fan!

An email showed up in my inbox, touting a colloquium with Fernanda Ferreira. Naturally I was intrigued, especially given that the title of her talk was "Information Structure Links Prediction and Good Enough Language Processing." Call me intrigued! She has backgrounds in psychology and linguistics, and is talking about a problem that has fascinated me for years? I became a fan!

I was reading through Stanford's alumni magazine, and found my way to an article about a woman who was a keynote speaker at a conference, and in that speech she said "The idea... was that we would have this global network, and the global network would allow us to communicate with anyone, anywhere, anytime. And that would bring us all of the hopes and dreams and glories that the human mind and heart could dream of. I wanted to live in that world." I became a fan!

Some time ago, I scribbled "Sadie Creese Oxford" on a scrap of paper, and it floated around my living room for months. I was recently cleaning, and couldn't remember what for, other than she seemed intriguing. I looked her up, and sure enough she is in computer science, directing cyber security initiatives. I became a fan!

I was flipping through the Economist when I noticed a page with a woman standing on a city sidewalk, holding the world. Placed by University of Michigan's School of Public Health, a caption to her image described Professor Bhramar Mukherjee's work, studying risk factors for chronic illnesses. I became a fan!

I was towards the end of reading O'Reilly's Ethernet: The Definitive Guide, learning about the operation of the Spanning Tree Protocol. The authors offer that one of the best summaries of the protocol's operation was a poem, by STP's creator: Radia Perlman. I became a fan!

I recently came across a mention of Maryam Mirzakhani's earning the Fields Medal in a magazine published by the MAA celebrating their centennial. I remembered back to when I had first heard she won the medal -- she was a professor in my own home department at Stanford. I became a fan!

Earlier this summer, I read Cloud System Administration, which had three authors. Reading through their bios on the back of the book, I was intrigued by the long list of experience Christina had in fields I find fascinating -- as well as an offhand reference to Formula One racing. I became a fan!