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CRA-E Selects 2018 Graduate Fellow

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Robert Bowden

CRA’s Education Committee (CRA-E) has recently selected its 2018 CRA-E Graduate Fellow – Robert (“Rob”) Bowden.  Rob is a Ph.D. student in computer science at Harvard University. After earning his undergraduate degree at Harvard in 2013, he spent a year working as the course preceptor for Harvard’s CS50 course, and then returned to graduate school with Margo Seltzer as his adviser. Rob’s Ph.D. research includes work on file systems and code synthesis. His current work focuses on how to use the vast amount of CS50 solutions generated by students to not only detect errors in student programs but also propose ways to fix them. Rob’s goal is to advance automated program repair of buggy solutions to introductory programming assignments.

Over the past four years, Robert has been a Freshman Proctor and a Teaching Fellow for a wide range of undergraduate courses. In this mentoring role, Rob lives in a freshman dorm alongside thirty first-year students, and is the primary academic advisor for many of them. Rob has an interest in computer science education, with a focus on students underrepresented in computer science and undergraduate research, including first-generation college students. Rob has served as the research mentor for a number of undergraduates.

CRA-E Fellow Keith Feldman (University of Notre Dame) ends his term this year. Keith helped improve the usability and resources on the CRA-E Conquer site and started the “Undergraduate Research Highlights” series, which showcases outstanding research done by undergraduate students at universities and colleges across North America. Keith has completed his Ph.D. and will continue at Notre Dame working on a long-term collaboration with a group in Brazil. He will teach a course in healthcare analytics in the fall, and will be pursuing work at a children’s research hospital the following year.  CRA-E Fellow Booma Sowkarthiga Balasubramani will continue for a second year.

The Graduate Fellows Program was established in 2015 to give graduate students the opportunity to contribute to CRA-E projects and promote computer science research and undergraduate education at the national level. CRA would like to thank Nancy Amato (chair) and Jeff Forbes for managing the selection process last year.