I’m a proud professor parent
It’s pride month. For me, that means a few things: wearing more color, standing a bit taller, smiling at visibly out queer people on the street, and eagerly volunteering at community events for trans and queer youth. But it also means drifting through the month as I waver between the exhaustion of advocacy optimism and dour despair as the U.S. takes many step backwards in queer civil rights. It is a month of celebration, of fear, of anger, of joy, all born from a shared history of hiding, shame, violence, revolt, and retreat. I’m going to guess many in the U.S. have a similar feeling about Juneteenth, which I hear from many can be a day of both joy and sadness.
Amidst all of those mixed feelings, however, is one thing that I find unequivocally great about June, and that is graduation. I love celebrating other people’s milestones. I cherish bringing communities together to recognize the collective nature of individual accomplishment. I enjoy watching families see the lives their children have lived in a new way, as they are about to transition to a new one. And most of all, I value how we collectively mark these milestone as a time to reflect on our past, to inform our future. There’s a mindfulness to all of it that feels important, and that I look forward to each year.
And so this year, I thought I’d celebrate the month by sharing what I’m most proud of from this past year: my research advising. I had five recent advisees searching for jobs, some PhD students, some postdocs, and so it was a year of support, uncertainty, travel, negotiations, and celebrations. I want to mark their accomplishments here, share their career plans, and try to connect their work to pride month and Juneteenth, and the focus of both on liberation. I’ll go in order from most to least recently graduated. (As you read, imagine me proudly reading their names out at a graduation ceremony).
Mara Kirdani-Ryan
First up is my visionary doctoral student Mara Kirdani-Ryan. Mara started off at the Allen School studying computer architecture, but after a year, realized that they wanted to study something more meaningful to them, and reached out to me, seeing if I had capacity to advise. I’m always trepidatious about these requests, because such big pivots usually entail so much learning. But Mara brought a broad familiarity with psychology, sociology, and queer theory, and I could tell from how they talked about computer science that they had a mind full of ideas to share.
They far exceeded my expectations. Their dissertation masterfully deconstructed the ways that culture, capitalism, and identity interweave to make computer science learning spaces in higher education a refuge for some, and a suffocating trial for others. Their work closely examined career planning as a site for clashes between individual identity work and capitalist forces; it explored neurodiversity and its relationship to legitimacy in CS cultures; and through two interventions, one modest, one ambitious, it explored what spaces can be made for CS students to do identity work in learning cultures that delegitimize identity. What I learned most from Mara’s work is the way that individuals and systems interact through identity, and the (often limited) opportunities for identity work to reshape systems. If any of this sounds interesting, I highly recommend reading their entire dissertation; it is beautiful, fascinating, and times, profound. Look for individual chapters to be published eventually, once peer reviewers find a way to tolerate qualitative methods that respect individuals privacy at the expense of “rigor.”
Mara will be joining us as a colleague as an Assistant Teaching Professor in The Information School at the University of Washington this Autumn 2024.
Jean Salac
This past May, my industrious postdoc Jean Salac wrapped up two years as a CIFellow, bridging her doctoral studies at the University of Chicago with her academic job search this year. I’ve known Jean since 2019, when I innocently asked her hard questions at a very early breakfast at the SIGCSE Technical Symposium. I guess I didn’t scare her too much, because she later asked me to join her committee, and then be her postdoc mentor in 2022. Both were an easy yes, as Jean was not only ambitious, creative, and highly productive, but also an incredibly warm and optimistic person I was glad to welcome into my lab.
Her two years with me were highly focused and strategic. She wanted to pivot from purely focusing on primary-level CS pedagogy to also thinking about CS critically. She imagined a future in which teachers would feel confident asking young children about fairness, accountability, transparency, and other social and ethical questions about computing. Her questions were highly focused: what do youth have to say about these things? How can we facilitate dialog about these topic? Through a rapid series of publications, she examined funds of knowledge that teens bring to discourse about fairness, children’s ethical sensemaking, teen’s ethical sensemaking, and collaborated on numerous other projects with my doctoral students. What I learned most from Jean’s work in these past two years is the incredible capacity of youth to apply moral and ethical reasoning from their families and lived experience to highly abstract discussions about data structures and algorithms. Read her work closely for insight on what it will actually take to engage in meaningful dialog about computing and fairness in primary and secondary education settings.
Jean will be starting as an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Carleton College in Fall 2024.
Alannah Oleson
Next is my enterprising former doctoral student Alannah Oleson, who graduated in Autumn 2024, and stuck around for an interim postdoc position while they conducted an academic job search this year. Alannah and I go way back to 2016, when they were an undergradate at Oregon State University. I knew they were special when we were running a summer camp together, and amidst all of the fragmented opinions each day from professors and PhD students, they were always ready with an actionable, incisive insight about our research questions, data collection, or pedagogy, despite being a 2nd year undergraduate. From day one, I felt like I could work with them as a colleague and collaborator, guiding them, but also learning from them equally.
Their interests early on where in design education, particularly from the perspective of human-computer interaction. They imagined a future in which computing students would not just see CS as building and shipping software, but also as questioning what is being made, why, and for whom, and using research as a tool to envision how we might realize that future. Their dissertation built foundational insights about ideas about how. They deconstructed distinctions between CS education and design education, showing how equating them ultimately erases design skill. They closely examined how students struggle to learn design skills in the context of CS learning. And then they contributed the clever pedagogical method, CIDER, which orchestrates students in “assumption elicitation”, helping them to see design choices through the lens of assumptions, growing their capacity to perspective take. And in the most entrepreneurial of ways, they convinced a whole group of faculty to integrate CIDER into their classes, finding that the method was flexible and impactful across a diversity of learning contexts and student groups. What I learned most from Alannah’s work is the precise ways in which design and CS intersection, and how we might teach at this intersection to make a more equitable future of computing. Read their dissertation for its mastery of mixed methods and exceptionally rich insight into student and teacher experiences with design pedagogy.
Alannah will be joining the University of Denver’s School of Engineering and Computer Science as an Assistant Professor this Fall.
Stefania Druga
Stefania is by far the most ambitious student I’ve ever had. I first met her in 2018 when she started at the Information School as a PhD student working with Jason Yip to focus on family learning about AI. About a year it, it became clear to both Stefania and I that I might be a better advisor fit, and so we made the switch. From day one, I felt like I was grasping the tail of a jet that was flying towards to the moon, trying to keep up with Stefania’s incredible drive and ability to realize her visions.
From the beginning, Stefania’s focus was on youth learning about AI and machine learning in informal settings, and particularly with family. Her vision was a world in which we had not only the platforms, but the pedagogical insight to promote AI literacies that empower youth to creatively express computational ideas, and while also understanding its the limits of AI. Her dissertation was a whirlwind of exploration of this vision, including a rich examination of the strengths and weaknesses of AI literacy resources online; a co-designed exploration of AI literacy learning activities with families; an investigation of AI literacy family learning dynamics; and a design exploration of intelligent AI assistants to facilitate family learning. What I learned most from Stefania’s expeditions was just how much creative exploration of AI is possible with just a little bit of scaffolding and platform support. Read her dissertation for a hundred little ideas about how to design creative platforms and learning experiences with AI, and how doing this with families changes what learning is possible.
After a few temporary stints at an X Moonshot project and as a researcher at the University of Chicago’s Center of Applied AI Research, Stefania landed a position as a Research Scientist in Google Gemini working on multimodal AI applications.
Benji Xie
I will never forget the first time I met my meticulous former PhD student Benji Xie in 2016. He was visiting UW as a recently admitted doctoral student in our College of Education, and had heard about me, asking on a whim if I was available to meet. I was, and we met, and I suddenly found myself face to face with a curious, conscientious MIT CS undergraduate passionate about CS education, data, learning, and equity. I think we both quickly realized that there was a great advising match, and I found a way for Benji to transfer to the Information School, where he studied with me for the next six years. He graduated in 2022 and joined Stanford as an Embedded Ethics postdoc in 2022, but he was on the academic job market this year.
Benji’s overarching focus during his doctoral studies, and in his postdoc, has been at the intersection of critical data studies and equitable education. He imagined a future in which data was not merely a site of oppression in education, but a carefully wielded tool for guiding equitable decisions about learning, teaching, and policy. His dissertation touched on all of these challenges, including how to use data to guide computer science students in what to learn next, how to use data to examine bias in CS assessments, and how to use data from students to surface inequities in and out of CS classrooms. What I learned most from Benji’s work is how data, while often a tool of oppression, does not have to be. With exceptional care, in both use and the design of use, it can be a powerful tool to shape learning and broader equity efforts. Read his dissertation to find out how.
Benji will join the School of Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Denver as a tenure-track assistant professor in Fall 2025 (with Alannah), staying at Stanford for one additional year as a postdoc.
Eight years of advising later, five very special people in my life have moved on, finding new intellectual homes to realize their visions. There’s something about that scale of time that is comforting to me in a month of advocacy, activism, and resistance. It’s a reminder that even relatively small things — like someone’s academic career—can take an immense amount of time, effort, and emotional labor to achieve. When I’m feeling like progress on justice in the world is just too slow and too exhausting, looking back on my students’ pathways is a reminder that every kind of change, liberatory or not, is a long, slow, arduous march. And on any long march, we have to remember to pause, to drink, to eat, to rest, to bond. And sometimes, to look back to see how far we’ve come.
