Home | About Us | Diversity & Inclusion

Diversity & Inclusion

We are committed to providing quality education to a diverse student population. This commitment to diversity is reflected in the composition of our faculty. In the Department of Computer and Information Sciences, one in four tenure-track professors are women (four full and two associate professors of 23). Over the past three years, 27% of our department’s graduate students have been female. The Faculty is also representative of diverse cultures.

NCWIT Academic Alliance. Our department is a member of the NCWIT Academic Alliance. NCWIT is the National Center for Women & Information Technology, a 501(c)(3)* coalition that works to increase diversity in IT and computing.
Our faculty serve as research mentors to summer undergraduate researchers through the CRA-W/CDC Distributed Research Experiences for Undergraduates program, which has the goal of increasing the number of women and underrepresented groups entering graduate studies in the fields of computer science and engineering.
Our department, along with the Dean’s office, is committed to financially support a cohort of early college computer science majors to attend the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing each year. The event is a series of sessions that include leading researchers presenting their current work and special sessions that focus on the role of women in today’s computer science, information technology, research and engineering fields.
The women undergraduates and graduates are members of ACM-W (Association for Computing Machinery-Women) and joins regularly with the College of Engineering’s Women in Engineering and UD’s Women in Technology groups for activities, including brown bag lunches, speakers, and social events.
The department regularly offers a service learning course, Learning Game Development, in which student teams practice their software engineering skills in designing and implementing learning games for middle school teachers and their students at the Chester Community Charter School in Chester, PA. This is an opportunity for students to help broaden participation in computing. The development of this course was funded by the National Science Foundation Broadening Participation in Computing program. More details can be found at Compute Teams 4 Youth.

Faculty in the Department of Computer and Information Sciences are active in diversity-related initiatives for broadening participation in computing.

Faculty advise students as part of the GEM Fellowship program.
Faculty present and participate in the RISE 5-week Summer academic bridge program to recruit and encourage academically prepared students who are native-born African American, Hispanic American, and Native American, as well as others who, as a group, are underrepresented in engineering.
Faculty have attended the Faculty Recruiting and Faculty Mentoring programs developed by the NSF sponsored UD ADVANCE program to increase the representation of, and improve the climate for, women faculty in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields.
Alumni Distinguished Professor Lori Pollock co-organizes the CRA-W Graduate Cohort program annually which aims to increase the ranks of senior women in computing by building and mentoring nationwide communities of women through their graduate studies.
Pollock serves regularly on the Academic Advisory Board for the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing.