Ellen Spertus

Professor of Computer Science
Mills College

Ellen Spertus is a computer science professor at Mills College in Oakland, California, and has worked as a software engineer and research scientist at Microsoft, Google, and Mozilla. She had led or been a core contributor to numerous open source projects, including App Inventor, Blockly, and the Hour of Code. She earned her bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees in CS from MIT, where she did research in computer architecture, compilers, and information retrieval. She has been active in promoting diversity in CS for thirty years. Highlights include co-founnding the annual conference Tech Intersections: Womxn of Color in Computing and teaching in a graduate reentry program for people wanting to transition into computing from other fields.

Pronouns: She, Her