Ellen Spertus

(she/her/hers)

Teaching Professor

Ellen Spertus
  • PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  • MS in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  • BS in Computer Science and Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Ellen Spertus is a teaching professor at the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University’s Oakland campus. Prior to her Khoury appointment, she was a professor of computer science and periodic department head at Mills College, where she taught a variety of courses, including computer architecture, programming languages, software engineering, and mobile application development.

Spertus has done research in a wide variety of areas, including parallel computing, information retrieval, online communities, recommender systems, and computer science education. She is most proud of having helped create App Inventor and the first Hour of Code, through which millions of people have been introduced to programming. She co-authored App Inventor and its second edition App Inventor 2 with David Wolber, Hal Abelson, and Liz Looney, and has presented about App Inventor and other topics at three SIGCSE Technical Symposiums. Other conferences she has published at include Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming (PPoPP), the International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA), Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI), the World Wide Web Conference (W3).