Eric S Roberts

Eric Roberts has been a truly outstanding educator for decades, starting as the first computer scientist at Wellesley College in 1980. He has personally taught thousands of computer scientists, and reached many more through his textbooks and curriculum development. His textbooks are exemplary; the first, Thinking Recursively, was named in a 1998 CACM survey article as one of the core texts that every computer science educator should know. He built an organization of professional lecturers at Stanford that has become a model for effective teaching of computer science at universities across the country.

Eric has shown exceptional leadership in computing education, made all the more effective because of the obvious priority he placed on being an outstanding educator. He devotes enormous time and energy to drawing attention to and addressing problems in our community, such as underrepresentation of women in computing and the need to devote more resources to computing education during times of enrollment surge. His principles and values have made him a respected voice in the computing education community.

Erics leadership is international in scope. He co-chaired the ACM Education Board for several years, and was one of the founding co-chairs of the ACM Education Council. From 1999 to 2005, he worked to develop a computing curriculum for public high schools in Bermuda. This program was the first national computing curriculum to be certified by an international standard board.

Erics work on Computing Curriculum 2001 exemplifies his leadership. He drew together diverse constituencies and stakeholders in a multi-year process. He was the principal author of the final report. The report is a significant intellectual achievement that has served educators around the world as they consider what every computing student needs to learn.