Faculty Profiles

Debra Calliss

Trevor Cohen

James Collofello

Partha Dasgupta

Dijiang Huang

Bill Lewis

Faye Navabi

Aviral Shrivastava

Guoliang Xue

Jieping Ye

faculty profiles

Faye Navabi

Senior Lecturer
Department of Computer Science and Engineering

Faye Navabi

“What will help students learn better? How can we better prepare high school students to succeed in college?” asks Faye Navabi. These are questions that Navabi, a senior lecturer in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, thinks about frequently. It is apparent that she has become skilled at answering them as well. Navabi was “Teacher of the Year” for the Department of Computer Science and Engineering in 2006 and was a nominee for the Ira A. Fulton CEAS Teaching Excellence Award in 2004.

As a member of SCI’s Undergraduate Program Committee, Navabi researches the most effective ways to teach and retain SCI undergraduates and works to improve the program curriculum. She also teaches introductory computer science courses each semester. “I like to see how much the students have learned by the end of the course,” Navabi said. “It’s really about teaching them how they have to study in college, how different college is from high school...I often have students coming by and telling me how much they’ve learned and how much they appreciate all the help
they get.”

“I know that my courses are hard work and that students have to study for many hours, but once they learn to write a program and they see that it is working and doing what it is supposed to do, they get so excited,” Navabi said. “It does take time, though. It takes persistence to do this, but that’s what makes it rewarding.”

Navabi has visited local high schools accompanied by SCI undergraduates and graduates in an effort to encourage high school students to consider a career in computer science. The SCI students share what they are studying, what computer science is all about and what kind of jobs will be available to them upon graduation. Navabi has also been instrumental in developing a pilot program that educates both high school teachers and students in basic principles of computer science.