Three members of the Wellesley CS faculty moved on to new positions this summer.
Susan Buck, Instructor in the Science Laboratory, web programming expert, instructor at the Harvard Extension School, and co-founder of the Women’s Coding Collective among a wealth of other things, joined the department in Fall 2014 and was instrumental in developing successful infrastructure and pedagogy in the popular CS 110 and CS 111 courses for three years. The 2017 senior class rated her as “single-handedly fixing the CS pipeline.” Susan is now expanding her ongoing pedagogical and development work at the other Boston-area institutions.
Sravana Reddy, Hess Fellow and natural language researcher, joined the department in Fall 2015 and introduced popular (and highly over-enrolled!) courses on natural language processing and machine learning. Sravana’s research recently investigated gender (and its obfuscation) in writing on social media. She was also a regular member of the CS 111 team, where she led development of Otter Inspector, a user-facing testing tool for CS 111 programming assignments that has now been used by multiple new crops of CS 111 students. Sravana continues her work in natural language processing, now at Spotify.
Anna Loparev ’10, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the HCI Lab, joined the department in Spring 2016 and made countless contributions to the research output of the HCI Lab, including leading the TangiBac research project creating novel playful interactions that engage young children in bio-design activities. The fun and dynamic interfaces she created were presented at multiple venues including the Tech Museum of Innovation, the New England Science Museum, and the TEI conference in Japan. Anna also taught CS110 and CS231, an enormous help to the department in times of high enrollment demand and tight staffing. Anna is now leading user interface development for the flagship product at Waters Corporation, a major scientific instrumentation company.
Fortunately, our colleagues remain Boston-area neighbors. Stay in touch, and best wishes beyond Wellesley!
In April, Wellesley CS Lecturer Christine Bassem was selected in a highly competitive process as a member of the inaugural class of the new ACM Future of Computing Academy. Christine and fellow ACM-FCA members traveled to San Francisco in June to join Turing Award winners and others for the 50th anniversary of the ACM Turing Award. The ACM-FCA members will take a prominent role in shaping the future of the ACM and the broader computing field, building connections between academia and industry.
