TVN To Honor Aspera CEO Michelle Munson

TVNewsCheck has chosen Michelle Munson, co-founder and CEO of Aspera, to receive its sixth annual Women in Technology Leadership Award.

The award will be presented during the NAB Show on April 19 at 6 p.m. in Room N-227 of the Las Vegas Convention Center.

Munson is co-inventor of Aspera’s Emmy-award-winning fasp transport technology and is responsible for overseeing the company’s direction in collaboration with co-founder Serban Simu. She speaks frequently on the technologies and trends influencing big data, cloud infrastructure and mobile.

“Michelle Munson’s pioneering work in the enablement of high-speed, data-intensive workflows has transformed the way media content is ingested, produced, managed, distributed and delivered,” said TVNewsCheck Co-Founder and Publisher Kathy Haley in announcing this year’s Women in Technology Leadership Award selection. “She is an inspiration not just to people in all walks of life, but in particular to women — and girls — building their careers, or aspiring to do so, in technology.”

Munson’s career includes stints as a software engineer in research and start-up companies including the IBM Almaden Research Center before founding Aspera, an IBM company, in 2004.

She has dual B.S. degrees in electrical engineering and in physics from Kansas State University and was a Goldwater Scholar for achievement in science and mathematics, and later a Fulbright Scholar at Cambridge University where she received a postgraduate Diploma in computer science.

Munson was the 2006 KSU College of Engineering Alumni Fellow (the youngest recipient ever), and has received national achievement awards from Glamour Magazine and USA Today.

TVN’s Women in Technology Leadership Award recognizes women who have contributed substantially toward advancing their industry technologically. It supports the National Association of Broadcasters Education Foundation’s Technology Apprenticeship Program, which places young engineers, who are women or people of color, in broadcast industry internships.

Previous Women in Technology Leadership Award honorees are Renu Thomas, EVP of media operations, technology and IT at Disney ABC Television Group; Darcy Antonellis, now CEO of Vubiquity;  Wendy Aylsworth, former SVP of Warner Bros. technical operations; Cindy Hutter-Cavell, senior engineer and practice manager, Cavell Mertz & Associates; and Andrea Berry, former SVP of media services at Fox Networks Engineering and Operations, who now heads her own consulting firm.