Jacobs School of Engineering Dean Al Pisano recently presented the 2017-2018 Computer Science and Engineering Department Teacher of the Year award to lecturer Joe Politz.
“As relatively new faculty, it's been a delight to hit the ground running teaching here,” Politz said. “The environment is so supportive of instructors designing and delivering the best course offering they can each quarter.”
Politz currently teaches Introduction to Computer Science: Java I, which is an intro course for students interested in applying computer science to media computation. He will teach Basic Data Structures and Object-Oriented Design this winter quarter.
Outside of his work at UC San Diego, Politz is also a part of the Bootstrap curricular outreach effort, which works with various school districts across the country to integrate computing and programming into core courses at the middle and high school level, in the hopes of making computer science more understandable and accessible to more students. This past summer, Politz led a workshop for teachers from the San Diego Unified School District that demonstrated computer science’s relevance to other curricula and encouraged the teachers to find ways to incorporate computer science into their classes.
Politz completed his Ph.D. in computer science at Brown University before joining the UC San Diego faculty in 2016. His research focuses on computer science education, programming languages, compiler design, web programming, and web security. Previously, Politz taught computer science courses as a visiting instructor at Swarthmore College and also has prior experience working at Google on web security.
By Jennifer Hollis, Qualcomm Institute