Dr. Mark Allen Weiss, SCIS Associate Director and SCIS Eminent Scholar Professor has been named the recipient of the 2015 SIGCSE Award for Outstanding Contributions to Computer Science Education. The award is presented annually to a single individual in recognition of significant contributions with long-lasting impact to computer science education.
Professor Weiss, who has been at FIU for his entire 28-year academic career, is an ACM Distinguished Educator and a fellow of the AAAS. He is the author of highly influential data structures textbooks that have been used by a generation of computer science majors, and served on the College Board’s Advanced Placement Development Committee for seven years, and as chair of the committee for four years. He was instrumental in the design of the worldwide high school curriculum that is still being used, and in the development of teaching techniques used in the introduction of object-oriented languages (in particular C++ and Java). Since 2009, he has served as Associate Director in the School of Computing and Information Sciences, and has been instrumental in securing roughly ten million dollars of state funding in support of FIU’s Information Technology related majors, while leading the academic programs of the nation’s seventh largest computing program.
The SIGCSE Award for Outstanding Contributions to Computer Science Education is the oldest and among the most prestigious of all computer education awards. Awarded annually since 1981, previous winners include famed computer scientists Grace Murray Hopper, Don Knuth, Randy Pausch, and William Wulf. The award will be presented at the 46th SIGCSE Technical Symposium in March 2015, where Professor Weiss will be giving a plenary address.