Dan Garcia

Dan Garcia is a Teaching Professor (aka Senior Lecturer with Security Of Employment) in the Computer Science Division of the EECS Department at the University of California, Berkeley, and joined the faculty in the fall of 2000. Dan received his PhD and MS in Computer Science from UC Berkeley in 2000 and 1995, and dual BS degrees in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering from MIT in 1990. He was chosen as an ACM Distinguished Educator in 2012.

He is active participant in SIGCSE (having presented every year since 2001), and is currently working with the Ensemble computing portal and ICSI Teaching Privacy research projects. He serves on the ACM Education Board, the Advanced Placement Computer Science Principles Development Committee, is the faculty champion for the local CSTA chapter, and the faculty co-director for BFOIT, a wonderful Berkeley K-12 outreach effort.

He has won all four of the department’s teaching awards:
* the Information Technology Faculty Award for Excellence in
Undergraduate Teaching in 2004
* the Diane S. McEntyre Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2002,
* the EECS outstanding graduate student instructor award in 1998, and
* the CS outstanding graduate student instructor award in 1992.
He was also chosen as a UC Berkeley “Unsung Hero” in 2005. He holds the record for the highest teaching effectiveness ratings (6.7/7) in the history of the department’s lower-division introductory courses.

He has taught (or co-taught) courses in teaching techniques, computer graphics, virtual reality, computer animation, self-paced programming as well as the lower-division introductory curriculum. He is currently mentoring over seventy undergraduates spread across four groups he founded in 2001 centered around his research, art and development interests in computer graphics, Macintosh OS X programming, computational game theory and computer science education. He recently co-developed a computing course for all
freshman engineers, as well as a full course renovation of the venerable introductory computing course for non-majors, “CS10 : The Beauty and Joy of Computing (BJC)”. This redesign earned a “Bears Breaking Boundaries” curriculum design award, a Lockheed Martin broadening participation grant, and was chosen as one of five national pilots for the new Advanced Placement Computer Science : Principles course. Thanks to three NSF grants, they are working to offer professional development to 500 high school teachers across the country, and are helping to build an online community of practice for all teachers in the CS10K project.

On the fun side, he can dance DDR level 7, play the harmonica, juggle 5 balls, score in the low 90s on the links, spin things on his finger and knows all the words to many old-school raps, stand-up comedy bits and Monty Python sketches. He also has a collection of several hundred game and puzzle books, and terribly enjoys sharing good brain teasers or playing any one of his many exotic board games with students who drop by during open office hours. Don’t get him started telling jokes…

His wife Tao is also a UC Berkeley Computer Science alumni, and is a Principal Scientist at Pandora Media. They have two young children.