Dr. Ian Gorton will be joining Northeastern’s College of Computer and Information Science’s Seattle campus as Director of Computer Science, effective June 1, 2015.

Gorton comes to Northeastern with 25 years of experience working in the software industry, academia, and government labs, both in the United States and Australia. He currently serves as a senior member of the Technical Staff with the Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute in Pittsburgh. Prior to Carnegie he worked as a lab fellow at the US Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. His research at both organizations focused on software architectures and technologies for scalable, big data systems in various scientific, engineering, and health-related domains.

“We just found the perfect person who’s the correct blend of knowing how to manage, teach and educate, and who is highly respected in the research community,” says Carla Brodley, Dean of Northeastern’s College of Computer and Information Science. “He has spent his career at this really interesting juncture of industry and academia. That’s perfect for the program that we’re building in Seattle.”

Gorton is widely cited for his work in software architecture, performance modeling, and big data systems. He has authored three books, including the highly regarded Essential Software Architecture, and more than 150 peer-reviewed journal and conference papers. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE Computer Society and a Fellow of the Australian Computer Society.

“Joining Northeastern’s Seattle campus is an exciting opportunity because it’s the chance to establish a world-class program that can forge synergies between education, practice, and research,” Gorton says. “There’s a well-established tech sector there, a great university sector, and lots of non-profit research labs. Being able to immerse myself in that community is really, really exciting.”

Northeastern’s Seattle campus offers graduate degrees that fill the region’s critical needs for highly educated professionals in computer science. “There’s a gap in how many high-tech jobs there are and the number of people educated in high tech,” says Brodley. “There just aren’t enough people. We’re trying to help broaden the pipeline both through our MS in CS and through a new on-ramp to the MS in CS for students who did not study CS as undergraduates.”

This program, called the ALIGN MS in CS, is a program for students who already have a bachelors in some other discipline. The program includes a custom-designed four course Post-Baccalaureate certificate that prepares students to move into the Masters program with the goal of going from there into industry. Current students in the program come from diverse disciplines such as English, Political Science, Classics and Biochemistry. In the last three years, Northeastern has piloted both the MS in CS and the ALIGN MS in CS in Seattle, and the first students will graduate in Fall of 2015. Dr. Gorton will take the program in new exciting directions, including substantial growth to respond to the critical need for computer scientists in the Northwest.