Richard Cobbe

Assistant Teaching Professor

  • PhD in computer science, Northeastern University 
  • MS in computer science, Northeastern University 
  • BA in computer science, Rice University 

Richard Cobbe is an assistant teaching professor at the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University, based in Seattle.  

Cobbe has delved into databases throughout his industry career, particularly at Oracle, where he worked for eight years as a principal software engineer. There, he implemented and maintained language extensions, including a SQL-like query language used with an in-memory column-store database for business intelligence and big data applications. From 2017 to 2022, he worked as a senior software engineer at Microsoft, where he contributed to Microsoft Edge, the CFlat compiler project, and infrastructure to support Rust development. 

After 15 years as an industrial developer, Cobbe joined Khoury College in 2023, keen to exercise his instructional skills again, to help students of all backgrounds understand computing topics, and to encourage them to think critically about the questions they’ll face in their careers. He teaches Database Management Systems and Programming Design Paradigms, with the latter echoing his earlier experience teaching programming to Khoury undergraduates during his doctoral studies.