Dr. Alvaro Monge has earned BS (UC Riverside, 1991), MS, and PhD (UC San Diego, 1993 and 1997) degrees in computer science. In 1997, he joined the Computer Science Department at the University of Dayton Ohio. In 1999, he joined the Computer Engineering and Computer Science Department at the California State University Long Beach (CSULB) where he is now a tenured full professor. CSULB is a teaching-intensive institution and thus, he has taught classes at different levels from introduction to programming and data structures; to junior level classes in database design; senior level classes on database, web development, and senior projects; and finally to graduate classes in database systems. He has held key positions as an academic advisor at the graduate and undergraduate levels and is currently the academic advisor for all computer science undergraduate students and for computer science students in the Engineering Honors Program. As a co-PI in a US Department of Education STEM grant for Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI STEM), he oversees grant projects at CSULB that seek to increase the retention and graduation rates of Latino students in STEM majors. In 2014, Dr. Monge joined a team that created NCWIT’s EngageCSEdu, an online living collection of peer-reviewed teaching instruments that use research-based techniques that retain and engage students, particularly effective in broadening participation in computing. Dr. Monge’s research interests have evolved over time. In the years after completing his PhD, he focused on the duplicate detection problem in databases and intelligent shopping agents. Through his participation in an NSF sponsored project, he ventured into computer science education research. Recently, his research emphasizes techniques to make content from web pages accessible to people with low vision.

Sarayu Sundar, Ph.D.
Dr. Sarayu Sundar serves as a Higher Education Research Associate with the National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT) at the University of Colorado