Leadership

Trevor Bonjour is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Computer Science and Engineering Department at the University of California, San Diego. He completed his PhD in Computer Science at Purdue University, where he won multiple awards for his teaching. Before diving back into academia, he spent five years in the software industry.

His work focuses on advancing AI education, with research interests in computing education, machine learning, reinforcement learning, and causal inference. He is passionate about evidence-based approaches that enhance student learning of complex AI concepts. 

Christine Alvarado is a Teaching Professor in the Computer Science and Engineering Department and the Associate Dean Undergraduate Education at the University of California, San Diego. 

Prior to coming to UCSD in 2012, she was an Associate Professor of Computer Science with tenure at Harvey Mudd College.  Her current efforts are focused on designing curriculum and programs to make computing and computing education more accessible and appealing, with the specific goal of increasing the number of women and underrepresented minorities who study computing.  

Her work is funded by several grants from the National Science Foundation including a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award and a CISE Pathways to Revitalized Undergraduate Computing Education (CPATH) award and a Computing Education for the 21st Century (CE21) award.  In 2013 she received the A. Richard Newton Educator ABIE Award from the Anita Borg Institute for her contributions diversity in computer science education.

Vignesh Gokul is a Ph.D. student at UC San Diego. His primary research interest is to explore deep learning models for content generation. 

He received his Masters in Computer Science from UC San Diego and his Bachelors from Anna University, India. He was the ERSP mentor for three cohorts from 2018-2021. In 2020, he received the CSE Award for Best Service and Leadership for his contributions.

Vaidehi Gupta is first year Master's student in Department of Computer Science at UC San Diego. Her primary interests are Data Science and Software Engineering.

Prior to coming to UCSD, she worked as a software developer at Oracle, India and completed her Bachelors from IGDTUW, India. She has been the central mentor for ERSP since Fall 2021.

Mai ElSherief is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Computer Science and Engineering Department. Before moving to UC San Diego, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech between 2020-2021 and was awarded a Ph.D. in Computer Science from UC Santa Barbara. 

She creates connections between the theory of Computer Science and Social Computing concepts, problems, and applications. Her current efforts are focused on creating a research-immersive experience for students, beginning during a student’s undergraduate studies, as undergraduate research has been shown to produce a variety of benefits for the student, including enhanced learning, increased retention, increased enrollment in graduate programs, and development of critical thinking skills.

She was selected as a 2020 UC Berkeley EECS Rising Star and she received the 2019 UCSB CS Outstanding Graduate Student award and the 2017 UCSB Fiona and Michael GoodChild Graduate Mentoring Award.