For first-year PhD student Skyler Austen, cybersecurity education is the focus of his work with Brown CS under faculty member Kathi Fisler. Skyler took his research and, for the last few months, worked with a high school teacher from his home state of Arkansas, James Houston, to host a statewide hackathon for middle school students at the beginning of April.
A member of Brown CS (entered class of 1991, graduated class of 2011), Lisa Gelobter is the CEO and the founder of a tech startup called tEQuitable that uses technology to make workplaces more equitable. tEQuitable’s mission is to help companies create a safe, inclusive and equitable workplace. They provide a confidential sounding board for employees to address and resolve interpersonal conflict, specializing in micro-aggressions and micro-inequities, and they provide data and insights to companies to identify and improve systemic workplace culture issues.
"Pivoting is a lot of what I do," Brown CS Research Associate Tom Sgouros says of a current project. It began in a familiar research area, virtual reality, and evolved in two different directions, resulting in work that offered unexpected depths along the route to an important and often neglected goal: aiding the visually impaired.
A member of the Brown CS class of 2013, Jonah Kagan is a software engineer at VotingWorks, a small nonprofit organization dedicated to building reliable, open-source election technology like voting machines, ballot scanners, and election-auditing software. When asked about the skills he uses for his career, Kagan explained that the knowledge learned in his very first computer science class, CSCI 0190 Accelerated Introduction to Computer Science, has helped him in his day-to-day life.
A member of the Brown CS class of 2017, Atty Eleti spent his time at Brown University organizing various hackathons for Hack@Brown, in the Undergraduate Teaching Assistant (UTA) mentorship program for computer science courses discussing topics such as distributed systems and discrete mathematics, and in the International Mentoring Program helping international students become acclimatized to the university’s community. Atty also augmented his CS degree with Brown’s curriculum and took graphic design courses at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD).
I am a junior at Rutgers University majoring in Computer Science and Cognitive Science. I’m really interested in research and debating questions about how minds work. Artificial intelligence research piques my interest. So, this summer, I joined the Humans to Robots Laboratory through the Brown Computer Science Artificial Intelligence & Computational Creativity Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) Site. I felt so welcomed. Everyone at Brown, from the professors to the staff members to the grad students and undergrads, were very supportive. The program gave me a peek into the exciting life of a full-time researcher in computer science. Every day …
Last summer, I interned at Brown University’s Data Science Initiative (DSI) with Professor Ritambhara Singh. The work I was doing, in computational genetics, was fascinating. And the office space was modern and light-filled. But most importantly, the lab was filled with welcoming grad students and amazing professors who worked right next to me.
Tatyana Dyshlova’s last few years have been fast-moving. In 2020, she co-founded and took on the role of CEO at FuzzyBot, a video game development studio, with a small but experienced team of colleagues. Late last year, FuzzyBot announced that it had received $3.5 million in seed funding, a major step forward for the burgeoning company. And her team is now in the midst of developing its first game, which Tatyana says will merge elements of the popular “action rogue” and “life sim” genres to create a unique experience for players.
“Something about Brown CS influenced me,” says alum Karen Smith Catlin, whose distinctive career path has taken her from working at Brown’s Institute for Research in Information and Scholarship (IRIS) to Vice-President of Engineering at Adobe to a new phase as acclaimed author and speaker on inclusive workspaces. “It’s a …