Workshop Bios for 2018

Photo	Name & Affiliation	Bio/blurb/career highlights/anecdotes/historical fiction
	Christine Alvarado Associate Teaching Professor, Computer Science and Engineering Department, UC San Diego	I got my undergraduate degree from Dartmouth College in 1998, and had a vague notion that I wanted to be a professor because I liked to teach. However, when I finished my PhD at MIT in 2004, I was not aware of the different emphasis placed on teaching vs. research in faculty positions at different institutions. I figured that I would simply learn to accept that research had to come first, as it had in graduate school. I applied mostly for traditional R1 faculty positions, with one exception: Harvey Mudd College. Luckily, Harvey Mudd was my first interview and I fell in love with the school and the position almost instantly. I was thrilled to discover a position where I could make teaching my top priority, while still doing active research. I was on the computer science faculty at Harvey Mudd for 7 years before family reasons took me to UC San Diego as an associate teaching professor in 2012. Both positions have allowed me develop a program of scholarship that blends teaching and research. I focus on developing educational programs, pedagogies and curricula to broaden participation in computer science. -- Things I wish I had known...
	Andrea Danyluk Dennis A. Meenan '54 Third Century Professor of Computer Science, Department of Computer Science, Williams College	I attended Vassar College as an undergraduate and was so grateful for my wonderful professors that I decided I wanted to grow up to be just like them. As a grad student at Columbia University, I had the opportunity to teach a section of CS1, which reinforced my desire to teach. I stepped off the teaching path briefly after grad school, working for four years in an industrial research lab. It was a great opportunity to develop my own research program post-dissertation, but the pull of teaching was strong, and I moved to Williams College in the rural northwest corner of Massachusetts. I've been there for over 20 years. At Williams I've taught courses at all levels -- from non-major to major core courses to electives -- as well as interdisciplinary courses in Cognitive Science. I've co-authored a textbook, been involved in both local and international curriculum design efforts, and served as department chair and acting dean of faculty. I'm a member of CRA-W and am especially interested in increasing the number of women and underrepresented minorities in CS. -- Things I wish I had known...
	Zach Dodds Leonhard-Johnson-Rae Professor of Computer Science, Department of Computer Science, Harvey Mudd College	After a couple of years of high-school math teaching, a conspiracy of admissions departments decided that I would pursue CS instead of math. For me, the adage turned out to be true: you can take the teacher out of the high school, but you can't take the high school out of the teacher. A small liberal-arts college of engineeering, Mudd, offered a chance for balancing those forces. Equilibrium hasn't been reached, but the balancing act has led to some memorable journeys... . -- Things I wish I had known...
	Jesse Heines Professor Emeritus, Department of Computer Science, University of Massachusetts Lowell	My teaching career began in 1970 at the Anglo-American School in Moscow in the former Soviet Union, where I taught middle school math and science. After graduate school I developed computer-based training courses for Digital Equipment Corporation until 1984. I've been at the Dept. of Computer Science at UMass Lowell ever since, happily retiring as Professor Emeritus in 2016. My classroom work focused on user interfaces, while my research combined my love of music with computing in a course called "Sound Thinking." That research was supported by three National Science Foundation grants and resulted in "Computational Thinking in Sound," a book coauthored with my Music Dept. colleague Gena Greher and published by Oxford University Press (compthinkinsound.org). I now take courses rather than teach them, swim regularly, do web-related volunteer work, and sing my heart out with my barbershop quartet, Fireside. Visit firesidequartet.net and buy our new CD! :) -- Things I wish I had known...
	Colleen Lewis Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science, Harvey Mudd College	I did undergrad at UC Berkeley in EECS and went to work for a few years. I missed the teaching I got to do in undergrad so much that I decided to go back to Berkeley to do a PhD in education and a MS in computer science. Starting in 2012 I became an assistant professor of computer science at Harvey Mudd College teaching computer science and doing computer science education research. My research and teaching are focused on making CS accessible to students who are traditionally underrepresented in CS. I’ve done teaching including K-12, small and large college classes, and an EdX MOOC for kids to learn Scratch. -- Things I wish I had known...
	Brandeis Marshall Associate Professor and Chair, Computer and Information Sciences, Spelman College	I received my undergraduate degree from University of Rochester. Then, I furthered my education at Rensselaer receiving my PhD in 2007. I was a teaching assistant for 8 semesters and taught briefly at Bard College while a graduate student. My faculty career began at Purdue. I taught databases and research methodology courses for 6 years before earning promotion and tenure in 2014. Teaching others inspires me. The small environment I found to be the most engaging. Throughout my entire education, I never had a teacher, instructor or professor who looked like me. So I changed course in summer of 2014 by accepting a faculty position as a tenured Associate Professor at Spelman College. I am now Chair of the Computer and Information Sciences Department, where I can contribute to data analytics research and teach at a women's HBCU. -- Things I wish I had known...
	Bruce Maxwell Professor and Chair, Department of Computer Science, Colby College	I started my teaching career as an undergraduate at Swarthmore College where I actually taught Computer Graphics (terribly) as a senior. After an M.Phil. at Cambridge and a Ph.D. at the CMU Robotics Institute, my first position was at the University of North Dakota, where I started to figure out the whole teaching and research aspects of the job. After two years, I went back to the Swarthmore Engineering department as the computer engineering professor and spent nine years there before coming to Colby College as the Chair of CS in 2007. As the incoming chair, I was able to redesign the curriculum and rethink how we taught our core courses. I've also had the chance to mentor faculty, create new programs, participate in College governance, and see all sides of the Promotion and Tenure process. For me, the balance of teaching and research, with great students, small classes, and the overall liberal arts environment is the ideal mix. -- Things I wish I had known...
	Darakhshan Mir Assistant Professor and Jane W. Griffith Faculty Fellow, Department of Computer Science, Bucknell University	I am an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Bucknell University (since Fall 2015), and am currently a Class of 2017-18 Data & Society Fellow. Before that, for two years, I was the Norma Wilentz Hess Faculty Fellow at Wellesley College. In college at a technical institute in India, I had never thought I would go on to get a Ph.D. (didn't even know what that meant, or that was an option for people like me!), let alone be a professor. Owing to a few accidents, and the support of one phenomenal mentor, I ended up at Rutgers University, where I earned my Ph.D. from. There I enjoyed teaching as a teaching assistant and instructor, volunteered to teach Math at an after-school program in an inner city middle school, and participated in "outreach" activities such as a robotics workshop for middle school girls in my native Kashmir. At some point it dawned on me that I enjoyed teaching and mentoring students one-on-one so much, that it made sense to make a career out of it. I discovered that institutions that deeply care about teaching exist, and went to my first SIGCSE workshop while in graduate school. I was thrilled to learn about the different options out there, and decided to apply only to liberal arts schools (LACs), unsure if I would be a good candidate. Fortunately, I met Janet Davis at Grace Hopper that year, who offered to talk to me more about LACs, pointed me to her excellent document on the details of preparing for a teaching-focused academic job search, and offered to read and give feedback on my application. She and other members of the SIGCSE community have been an inspiration on how I can pay forward (I just managed to convince two graduate students to apply to LACs!). I dream of creating a "roadshow" with my colleague Evan Peck on "Why unsuspecting graduate students should consider a variety of academic institutions?" I really enjoy being a professor at a teaching-focused liberal arts institution -- getting to interact with students closely, having an opportunity to be part of their intellectual journey, and learning from and with colleagues in various disciplines across campus. The students I have worked with both at Wellesley and Bucknell are a delight and I wouldn't trade this part of the job for anything else (grading is another matter!). My research interests are in the area of data privacy. I am deeply -- intellectually, professionally, and pedagogically -- engaged in teasing out the tensions between the positive and negative impacts of technologies on lives. I feel that this is an important bridge between my teacher self and my scholar self, and something I am able to explore and pursue at a liberal arts institution. -- Things I wish I had known...
	Leo Porter Assistant Teaching Professor, Computer Science and Engineering Department, University of Clifornia, San Diego	I received my BA at the University of San Diego and was inspired by my great professors to pursue a future as an academic. After a 4 year tour as an officer in the United States Navy, I went to UC San Diego where I finished my Masters and Ph.D. in Computer Architecture. Although I will always enjoy working on designing faster and more power efficient processors, even as a graduate student I knew I loved teaching. So much so, I TA'd for 17 terms and took side positions teaching computer architecture as an instructor at USD and UCSD. My first tenure track full-time position was as an Assistant Professor at Skidmore College. In 2014, I moved to UCSD as an Assistant Teaching Professor. Again, I've taught a wide array of classes but now the class sizes vary from 25 (small graduate class) to 360 (upper division undergraduate class) students. Recently, I also gained experience creating MOOCs with tens of thousands of enrolled students. These days, my research focus is primarily computer science education, specifically effective pedagogical practices, indicators of student success, and assessment of student learning. -- Things I wish I had known...
	Mehran Sahami Professor and Associate Chair for Education, Computer Science Department, Stanford University	For better or worse, I am a Stanford "lifer", having received my BS, MS, and PhD all from the Computer Science department there. Luckily, I was involved with teaching a good portion of that time, first as a TA and then as a lecturer. After graduate school, I managed to escape to industry for about a decade (mostly spent in the research group at Google), before the gravitational pull of Stanford got too strong and I was pulled back in as a faculty member in 2007. In addition to teaching and research, I've really enjoyed working with a number of diverse teams on a variety of initiatives, both inside Stanford (e.g., CS curriculum overhaul, committee to develop career pathways for lecturers in engineering at Stanford) and out (e.g., ACM/IEEE-CS Computer Science Curricula 2013 (with Andrea!), co-founder of Learning at Scale L@S) and Educational Advances in AI (EAAI) conferences). Currently, I'm working on not writing a book on probability theory and machine learning. The not writing part has been so successful, that I've recently partnered with a former student, who is now a lecturer at Stanford, to write it together. -- Things I wish I had known...

2018 Participants