I am a Professor (and past chair) of Computer Science at Carleton College. I currently serve as STEM Director at Carleton. I teach courses in computer networking, human-computer interaction, software design, and computer architecture, as well as our intro courses and our senior capstone experience (“Comps”). I research, design, and evaluate ways to make computer networks more usable and user-friendly, intersecting the fields of human-computer interaction and computer networks and focusing on quality of experience. Pedagogically, I’m interested in active/collaborative learning and academic civic engagement.
My experiences are a bit unique: I’m a former electrical engineer who came to computer science after graduate school, which means I’m often teaching classes that I myself never took! I also worked for a few years between the PhD and my academic position, as a postdoc in an industrial research lab.
Computer science is a beautiful field with a somewhat ugly and closed culture. It can be very unwelcoming to those who don’t look and act the part of a stereotypical computer scientist. Every day I work to change this culture, to make computer science a happier and more welcoming place for everyone.
On this page, you’ll find a bit of everything: teaching, research, technology, gender/diversity issues….and occasionally, glimpses of my life outside work.
This is what a computer scientist looks like 