Faculty Profiles

Debra Calliss

Trevor Cohen

James Collofello

Partha Dasgupta

Dijiang Huang

Bill Lewis

Faye Navabi

Aviral Shrivastava

Guoliang Xue

Jieping Ye

faculty profiles

Debra Calliss,

Lecturer, School of Computing and Informatics

As the current chair of the undergraduate program committee, Debra Calliss researches the most effective ways to teach and retain SCI undergraduates and works to improve the program curriculum. As a graduate of ASU’s masters and Ph.D. programs in computer science, former teaching assistant and academic advisor, she is particularly well-suited for this position.

Now an SCI lecturer, Calliss is also teaching the capstone course, a graduation requirement for all undergraduates. During this two-semester long course, students work in groups of four to six with a faculty mentor or industry sponsor on a defined project. Currently one group is creating a database that will be used for medical recruiting and another is designing a video game.

“I think it’s probably the closest thing that we can offer them to industry experience…even by the time they’re seniors, the students have a huge difference in their abilities, interests and backgrounds,” said Calliss. “With the capstone, they’re coming together and balancing these differences out which they will eventually do in a job. This is much more open-ended than a professor telling a student ‘Write a program that will do A, B and C.’”

Keeping the computer science program industry relevant in a time of ever-evolving technology is not a simple process. “There’s always something new and you can’t jump after every new thing,” said Calliss. “We have to have a core of material and allow students to take electives that build up their own interests.”

“People are communicating so differently than they were even five years ago,” she said. “One of our challenges is how to use these changes in communication and technology to better educate our students.”