Teaching

In my 20+ years at Stony Brook I have taught more than twenty different courses, I have had more than 7000 students, and have advised a number of interesting and unusual student research projects. In short, I have enjoyed every minute of it. As a lecturer, I am charged with helping our undergraduate students start on the road toward their academic and professional goals as Computer Scientists and Software Engineers, and each semester I am impressed with the work that they do. It is a very lucky thing for one to teach courses where the students are smarter than the instructor, and I have no shortage of experience with such luck.

The students I have taught are now working everywhere software is made. I have ex-students who have gone on to work as Software Engineers at Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, the NSA, HBO, Activision, Intel, Epic Games, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank, Sledgehammer Games, Bloomberg, Rockstar Games, 2KGames, Softheon, Applied Visions, Riot Games, JP Morgan Chase, the BBC, MTV, Facebook, and countless other employers. They have also gone on to found companies of all sorts. Stony Brook Computer Science Undergraduates truly go on to build the technologies that run our world. I also have ex-students who have gone on to graduate school at elite institutions like Stanford, Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon, Columbia, and many others.

Student Work

We make you make stuff. One of the best things about earning a degree in Computer Science is the projects one works on along the way. In our department, we really make you make stuff. By "We" I mean the Computer Science Faculty, and by "stuff" I mean software projects of all sorts. This is one of the foundations of my own teaching style, which you may read more about in my Teaching Statement. Over the years in teaching my courses I have assigned all sorts of different work, always trying to keep them interesting. Below are snapshots of some of those student projects.

I'm also interested in the history of computing, which helps, since I'm the course coordinator for CSE 301. Understanding how we got here, technologically speaking, helps to better understand where we may be going. And it makes one more interesting at nerd parties. Below is a sampling of student work from that course where each student summed up the life of a computing pioneer in a one minute video. Visit the ComputingHistorySBU channel for all the submissions.