Computing Educators Oral History Project

Location(s) where grew up: Glencoe, IL USA, a north suburb of Chicago

Location(s) for post-secondary education: S.B. Computer Science and Engineering (1990), S.M. Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (1992), and Ph.D. Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (1998) from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, MA USA

Location(s) where employed: Summer intern and researcher at Microsoft Research Silicon Valley in Mountain View, CA USA; various positions at Google in Mountain View, CA USA, including senior research scientist, research scientist, software engineer, and visiting scientist; various positions at Mills College in Oakland, CA USA, including Assistant Professor of Computer Science, Director of Interdisciplinary Computer Science, Chair of the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, and Associate Professor of Computer Science

Career stage when interviewed: Early career; Associate Professor of Computer Science at Mills College and Research Scientist at Google

Areas of interest: Information retrieval, online communities, social issues, computer architecture, compilers

Highlights: Named Sexiest Geek Alive in 2001; profiled in a 1993 New York Times article about "women who might change the face of the computer industry"; in 1991, as part of Sherry Turkle's course "Women and Computing" at MIT, wrote the report "Why are there so few female computer scientists?"

Interviewed October 23, 2008 by Vicki Almstrum