Dr. Christina Gardner-McCune
Dr. Christina Gardner-McCune is a new Assistant Professor at Clemson University in the Human-Centered Computing Division of the School of Computing. She has her PhD in Computer Science from GA Tech. She enjoys combining her expertise in computing with her passions for cooking, science, and designing learning experiences and technologies for middle and high school students as well as undergraduates. Her research focuses on gaining a better understand of how students learn and apply STEM and computing content in their everyday lives and to design learning environments to support students in making these connections.
She is the co-designer of Kitchen Science Investigators (KSI), a year-long cooking and science program for middle school students, that teaches the science behind cooking. She led the design of the GA Tech I3 Experience (Imagine, Investigate, and Innovate), a series of after-school programs designed to motivate and support high school students in the creation of personal expressions of computing through hands-on, project-based learning. She led the design of the Computational Thinking Olympiad (CTO) for middle school students to learn about computing through a one-day competition where they engage in physically and mentally challenging activities. On the undergraduate level, she participated in the national pilot of the new AP CS Principles course and designed and instructed a course in mobile application design for non-CS majors.
She has recently completed Post-Doctoral Fellowship in the Office of Outreach, Enrollment, and Community in the College of Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology where she designed the after-school and summer camp programs. She holds a B. S. degree in Computer Engineering from Syracuse University, and earned both her masters and doctorate in Computer Science from Georgia Institute of Technology.
She is also a board member of Y-STEM (Youth Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics organization), a non-profit foundation focused on enhancing the quality and accessibility of formal and informal STEM learning opportunities to African American and disadvantaged youth.
She has earned several awards for research (FACES Doctoral Fellowship, FACES Postdoctoral Fellowship, and GEM Fellowship), teaching (Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award for the College of Computing 2009), and Collaboration (Georgia Institute of Technology Outstanding Staff Performance Award). Her work has been featured in the New York Times Magazine and on CNN.