Mark Corner named a Lilly Fellow

Prof. Mark Corner

The UMass Amherst Center for Teaching (CFT) named Assistant Professor Mark Corner as a Lilly Teaching Fellow for the 2007-2008 academic year. Lilly Fellows are selected for this competitive program on the basis of their promise in teaching and research, their interest in undergraduate teaching and in developing innovative teaching skills, and their potential for making a positive impact on the teaching culture in their department, college, and broader campus community.

“One glaring problem that computer scientists everywhere are confronting is that of declining enrollment and an incredible lack of diversity in classes, especially female students,” says Corner. “Studies have shown that the primary barrier to entry is the perception that computer science equals programming, and that computer scientists work alone.”  For his Lilly project, Corner plans to confront both of these problems at an introductory level of undergraduate computer science education.  He will begin a new class, called Usability, to show undergraduate students a side of computer science rarely seen at the introductory level: the interface between computation and humans.

The course will be structured around team projects, hands-on user studies, and class collaboration through the use of wikis.  Corner hopes to find links to the Psychology department, as well as bringing potential majors from the Information Technology minor.  The first run of the class is being taught this fall. 

Professor Corner joined the Department in 2003. He co-leads the Privacy, Internetworking, Security and Mobile Systems Lab (PRISMS) with Professors Brian Levine and Kevin Fu. Corner received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Michigan (2003), and his M.S. and B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Virginia (both in 1998). Corner received a National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2005. He received Best Paper Awards at the USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST ’07) and ACM Multimedia Conference (’05). 

Previous Lilly Teaching Fellows in the Department include Emery Berger (2006-2007), Andrew McCallum (2005-2006), Brian Levine (2003-2004), Prashant Shenoy (2001-2002), James Allan (1999-2000), Ramesh Sitaraman (1996-1997), David Mix Barrington (1994-1995), Jim Kurose (1993-1994), and Eliot Moss (1991-1992).