Wellesley CS is delighted to welcome three new faculty members to the department for Fall 2017.

Assistant Professor Ada Lerner studies computer security and privacy, especially in interaction with social systems, the law, and human needs.  They combine low-level measurement studies and systems building projects with high-level human subjects work in order to design and build tools that solve human problems, with an eye especially for needs of underprivileged groups. Ada’s recent work explored the security and privacy needs of journalists building and evaluating Confidante, a usable encrypted email system.  Ada joins us from the University of Washington in Seattle, where they recently received their PhD.  Ada is teaching CS 230 this fall. Come introduce yourself to Ada in SCI E120!

Assistant Professor Catherine Grevet Delcourt ’09 prototypes social systems to study how people relate to each other through social technologies.  She uses the lenses of human-computer interaction and social computing to develop novel prototyping methods for social systems research and to explore the role of social media in political polarization, identity and anonymity in online conversations, personal information management, and personal informatics.  Catherine, a Wellesley alum, returns to join us via PhD work at Georgia Tech and research on social systems at Yik Yak.  She is teaching CS 115 this fall. Stop by to meet Catherine in SCI E104!

Hess Fellow Cibele Freire is a theoretical computer scientist whose research focuses on computational complexity and the theoretical foundations of databases. Her recent work has characterized several classes of database queries with respect to the notion of “resilience” — quantifying the minimal database changes required to cause a query to return different results. Cibele’s work has applications in efficiently updating database views and in explaining query results.  Cibele joins us from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where she conducted her PhD work.  She is teaching CS 235 this fall.  Come meet Cibele in SCI S160!

Please join us in extending a warm welcome to Ada, Catherine, and Cibele!

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!