Dean's Seminar Series Welcomes Jeannette M. Wing

The McCormick Dean's Seminar Series welcomes Jeannette M. Wing, President's Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, who will speak Wednesday, Feb. 9 at 4 p.m. in the ITW room in the Ford Motor Company Engineering Design Center.

In her lecture "Computational Thinking," Wing will explore the ways in which the fundamental concepts of computer science and the abstracting ability they instill have influenced other disciplines, as well as how they can be utilized to inspire future generations of researchers.

Wing’s general research interests include the areas of specification and verification, concurrent and distributed systems, and software engineering, while her current concentration is centered on the foundations of trustworthy computing, with a focus on reasoning about privacy.

Wing was or is on the editorial board of 12 journals and has served as a member of numerous academic advisory boards, including the Microsoft Trustworthy Computing Board, the National Academies of Science’s Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, and the Sloan Research Fellowships Program Committee. From 2007-2010, Wing was the assistant director of the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate at the National Science Foundation. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Association for Computing Machinery, she served as co-chair of the Networking and Information Technology Research and Development Program from 2007-2010. 

Wing received her BS and MS degrees in electrical engineering and computer science in 1979, and well as her PhD degree in computer science in 1983, all from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She served as the department head at Carnegie Mellon from 2004-2007.