Leveraging programming difficulty to improve understanding and perceptions of non-majors

I’m a Teaching Professor in the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where I founded and lead iCAN a one-year program that equips college graduates without a computing background with foundational knowledge in programming, algorithms, and data structures. iCAN provides an accelerated pathway to the Master of Computer Science (MCS) at Illinois, where most of our graduates continue their studies.

This work grows out of my own path as an interdisciplinary computer scientist. My research began in high-performance computing and computational biology, at the intersection of computing and the sciences. Today, I focus on expanding access to computing for people from all backgrounds.