We have some exciting speakers this year, as well as some remarkable award winners; like you, we're looking for the thought-provoking message's they'll bring to SIGCSE this year.
Jan Cuny received her Ph.D. in Computer and Communication Sciences from the University of Michigan. She spent the next 20 years as a faculty member, at Purdue University, the University of Massachusetts, and the University of Oregon. Her research focused on massively concurrent computation, particularly on debugging tools and programming environment support for computational science.
Jan was a long time member, co-chair, and steering committee member of the Computing Research Association’s Committee on the Status of Women in Computing Research (CRA-W). That work led to her current position at the National Science Foundation (NSF), where she work to address the longstanding underrepresentation of women, African Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans, and persons with disabilities in computing. CS education is integral to broadening participation.
Focusing first K-12, Jan spearheaded NSF’s efforts to build foundational support for CS10K, a national initiative to get engaging, inclusive and rigorous computing courses into America’s public schools. Within this effort—named because its initial target was 10,000 teachers in10,000 schools—NSF funded the development of two new courses (Exploring Computer Science and Advanced Placement® CS Principles), course materials, assessments, models of scalable professional development, and an online community of practice for teachers. NSF is now partnering with private organizations to pilot and scale these courses with the goal of giving all U.S. students the opportunity to take great computer science courses in high school.
Additional efforts will be needed in diversifying and expanding K-8 and undergraduate education, and in building the CS education research enterprise.
Jan is a recipient of a 2006 ACM President’s Award, the 2007 CRA A. Nico Habermann Award, the 2009 Anita Borg Institute’s Woman of Vision Award, the 2014 Richard A. Tapia Achievement Award, and the University of Massachusetts School of Computing Alumni Award for Outstanding Contributions to Society.