Heather Pon-Barry

Heather Pon-Barry is a Clare Boothe Luce Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Mount Holyoke College. She directs the Interactive Computing Research Lab where she and students are enabling humanoid and service robots to engage human users in conversational dialogue. She also works on activities to broaden participation in computer science, including the development of MaGE (Megas and Gigas Educate), a peer mentorship program with a novel curriculum that prepares undergraduate students to provide effective feedback on coding assignments and contribute to an inclusive learning environment.

Heather earned a doctoral degree in computer science from Harvard University in 2013, where her research was supported by a National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship (NDSEG), a National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship, and where she was named a 2013 Siebel Scholar. Previously, she worked in the Natural Language Understanding Group at Bosch Research and Technology Center in Palo Alto, California and in the Computational Semantics Lab at the Center for the Study of Language and Information at Stanford University. She holds BS and MS degrees in Symbolic Systems from Stanford University.