For the last two decades professors, non-profits, philanthropists, NSF and other government agencies have been working to broaden participation in computing in higher-ed. At the same time booming enrollments, college budget models, and other factors have not enabled large-scale systemic change. In this talk, Dr. Carla Brodley will describe common institutional barriers to retention and attraction to computer science and discuss concrete measures that lead to systemic change.
Professor Carla E. Brodley is the Dean of Inclusive Computing at Northeastern University, where she serves as the founding Executive Director for the Center for Inclusive Computing, a national initiative funded by Pivotal Ventures, to increase the representation of women graduating with degrees in computing. Dr. Brodley served as Dean of Khoury College from 2014-2021. During her tenure as image retrieval of medical images, computational biology, chemistry, evidence-based medicine, and Dean, the representation of women majoring in computing increased from 19% to 32%. Prior to joining Northeastern, she was a professor of the Department of Computer Science and the Clinical and Translational Science Institute at Tufts University (2004-2014) and on the faculty of the School of Electrical Engineering at Purdue University (1994-2004). A fellow of the ACM, AAAI and AAAS, Dr. Brodley’s interdisciplinary machine learning research led to advances not only in computer science, but in other areas including remote sensing, neuroscience, digital libraries, astrophysics, content-based predictive medicine.