Telling our stories – Emiliana Murgia
Each year we meet incredible women at womENcourage™ celebrations. We ask womENcourage participants to tell their stories in blog posts. We continue March, 2024 with Emiliana Murgia, PhD candidate in Learning Sciences and Digital Technologies in Italy and she is a primary school teacher and a researcher. 
“I started my path in research in computer science, more specifically, children’s IR. It’s an under-researched area that needs extra care, particularly now in the generative AI age. IR fascinates me because they are the gate to the (online) world for modern students and all of us.”
I’m a PhD candidate in Learning Sciences and Digital Technologies in Italy. But that doesn’t say a lot about me.
I am a primary school teacher by design or, better, a teacher by my students’ design, as they shaped me, teaching me how to teach them.
I received my first personal computer upon graduating from the university in 1994. As soon as I worked on a computer with an Internet connection, I was overwhelmed by the opportunities these technologies could bring, making communication and daily life easier.
Working at school, I soon realized that the digital technologies around me were designed for something other than the users in the school context—at least the majority of them.
Curiosity killed the cat; yes, my curiosity pushed me to attend a PhD at this stage of my life. However, as long as I can recall, passionate people around me have been the other magic ingredient that helped me grow. And that’s happened also with computer science. In 2017, I met Monica Landoni from USI Università della Svizzera Italiana in Lugano; she was the scientist who opened the door to a new world. With Sole Pera and Theo Huibers, I started my path in research in computer science, more specifically, children’s IR. It’s an under-researched area that needs extra care, particularly now in the generative AI age. IR fascinate me because they are the gate to the (online) world for modern students and all of us.
We are an interdisciplinary group. Monica, Sole, and Theo are computer scientists from different fields, and I work in education. The best part of researching together is the human part: building meaningful relationships, working in groups, sharing, and helping each other, also at work. I think the soft skills are the most important -and challenging- to train and gain. We can find some help for the hard skills in our machinery world.
The computer scientist world was born female and grew up male. So, it’s even more challenging for a woman to embrace this career. WomEncourage works to ease the connection and strengthen women in computer science by allowing them to meet, bond and grow together.
As I said, I’m a researcher, not a computer scientist; still, I embraced the proposal to join Womencourage because I felt it could be an excellent opportunity to develop and meet young students and expert professionals in person. And … I was damn right! I met incredible people in a warm and welcoming environment and learned essential lessons on topics I had not met before. I felt less alien than I thought, being from education and older than other students, and this is another massive gift of WomEncourage: it does really empower people that attend it.
My 3-year PhD is at the beginning of the second year, and it’s not an easy peasy path; nevertheless, WomEncourage gave me the feeling that I can try, do it, and find the way to go on. So, WomEncourage is in my 2024 planning because I need the women’s network around me.