GW Engineering and computer science department alumni Darakhshan Mir, M.S.’06, Associate Professor of Computer Science at Bucknell University, has recently been appointed to the endowed position of John P. and Mary Jane Swanson Professor in Engineering and the Sciences at Bucknell. The position was created by gifts from Mary Jane Swanson, Class of 1952 at Bucknell, and her family. Faculty appointed to this professorship engage students through instruction, collaborative research, and scholarship in engineering or the natural sciences.
Bucknell announced her selection with the following excerpt: Professor Mir’s scholarly and pedagogical interests are centered around efforts to transform the discipline of computing, the knowledge and technologies we create, and therefore the world, to be more equitable and less unjust. Over the last few years, her scholarly efforts have focused on a transdisciplinary project with colleagues Nathan Ryan and Vanessa Massaro and several undergraduate students that investigates the impacts of algorithmic decision-making and the ideologies these algorithms encode on incarcerated people in Pennsylvania. Through her pedagogical and community-building efforts, she aims to challenge entrenched notions of meritocracy in Higher Education in general and STEM in particular.