Note: My CV and full list of publications are currently available on my previous personal website.

I am a Postdoctoral Research Scholar at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, supervised by Geoffrey Herman. Currently, my research focuses on Computer Science Education, where I investigate the challenges that instructors face when adapting modern teaching systems like PrairieLearn. These systems allow instructors to create assessments and practice questions via code, which means that a single questions can be automatically graded, and support potentially infinite randomized variants of the same question without additional effort for the instructor. Although this technology comes with the promise of engaging students in self-driven online learning and saving instructors time and resources in the long term, it currently comes with a high barrier of entry and requires up-front time and resources that is not available to many instructors.

During my Ph.D. at the University of British Columbia, I have investigated the challenges faced by a different group of non-traditional programmers: end-users. Under the supervision of Reid Holmes and Ron Garcia, and in collaboration with David C. Shepherd, I have designed and built end-user-friendly systems for robot programming. These systems combined design elements from visual and block-based programming to address programming challenges that are typically seen as too complex for novice programmers. For example, we created a system that allows end-users to coordinate two robot arms as they solve a task, and another system that enables them to write large, event-based programs for mobile robots.

Generally, I am interested in research that is on the brink of Software Engineering, Computer Science Education, Human Computer Interaction, and Programming Language design. I believe that solving challenges that span multiple of these areas intersect can create large and lasting benefits for many computer science practitioners, both experts and end-users. Beyond end-users and computer science educators, I am also interested in research that involves programmers from other non-expert backgrounds and domains.

Before coming to North America, I grew up in the beautiful city of Mannheim in Germany, and studied and worked in the not quite as beautiful, but academically more promising city of Darmstadt. I finished my undergraduate education and my Master’s degree at the Technische Universität Darmstadt. In Spring 2016 I went on an exchange term to Simon Fraser University, where I had a unique chance to experience the exciting West coast of Canada.