In 1982, the cohort of mathematics professors who founded the College of Computer Science (now Khoury College) included three women and three men, a unique balance in an emerging field that was male dominated. Harriet Fell, a professor at Northeastern since 1971, was one of the professors who chose to take on the challenge of creating this new college, despite having no formal training in computer science. Fell saw an emerging need…and a big opportunity.

Fell worked tirelessly to educate herself in the field while simultaneously collaborating with colleagues to develop courses for first-year students. “When we started the college, we had zero courses.” she said. “We had to create everything as we went.” The curriculum that the group developed went on to become the foundation for the Khoury first-year program and subsequently won national curriculum awards.

One of Fell’s biggest collaborations in her time at Khoury was her work with Linda Ferrier, a professor of speech-language pathology and audiology, to design software for users with disabilities. Over the years, Fell’s students, both undergraduate and graduate, helped to develop the software as part of their coursework. The students’ work on designing solutions to these real-world problems was expanded when Fell and Ferrier were funded by a National Institute of Health grant to develop a technology to identify infants with speech difficulties and then build tools to support them in their communication. Fell received an excellence in teaching award for leading senior projects classes in doing this work.

Bringing her passion for drawing and painting to her computer science work, Fell also developed graphics courses and built up the graphics program at Khoury. The courses were popular with students who were also looking for an opportunity to unite their artistic and computer science interests.

Although Fell retired in 2015, she found that her work was not yet done. Just a week after her retirement, the textbook she had co-written was published, and she began work on developing videos to support the text. Then, three weeks after her retirement, she received an NSF grant jointly with Tim Bickmore that helped support one of her graduate students in his doctoral work. She returned to Khoury to support her student in this four-year project.

Of course returning to support her student is not unexpected from a professor who always gave so much of her time to multiple committees and organizations, including serving for six years as secretary/treasurer of SIGCAPH, now sigACCESS, a special interest group of the national ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) supporting work to help people with disabilities.

When we started the college, we had zero courses. We had to create everything as we went

Ultimately, Fell spent more than 30 years at Khoury, and in that time, she witnessed how it has changed and grown. “[It has] become an outstanding place over the years,” she said. “It was tiny, and we were struggling hard just to exist. It’s very impressive to see what’s happened.”