Immigrant Computer Scientists

Episode 13: Interview with Jelani Nelson, Professor of EECS at UC Berkeley. Grew up in US Virgin Islands, where an overwhelming majority of population is Black and the educational ethos is very different from the mainland US 50 states. He also created two successful international CS programs for high schoolers: AddisCoder and USVICoder,  in Ethiopia and US Virgin Islands. MIT PhD 2011.  

Episode 12: Interview with Amr El Abbadi, Professor of CS at UCSB. Immigrant, in the 1980s, from Egypt and Lebanon. Son of famous historians and academics. 

Episode 11: Interview with Fadel Adib, MIT Professor. MIT PhD. Entrepreneur. Humanitarian. Immigrant from Lebanon.

Episode 10: Interview with Soodeh Farokhi, Entrepreneur and founder of successful companies in Iran and Canada (C2RO), with a PhD in between from Austria. Topics include women entrepreneurs in STEM,  immigrants as entrepreneurs, whether a PhD maketh a better entrepreneur, deciding not to immigrate to US.

Episode 9: Two young and successful entrepreneurs originally from Iran and Lebanon, now residing in Canada and US. One - she has founded successful startups in both Iran and Canada, with a PhD from Austria in between. She is from Iran. Two - he is a Professor of Computer Science at MIT. He is from Lebanon. 

Episode 8. Interview with Rodrigo Fonseca, Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research. Formerly: Tenured Associate Professor of Computer Science, Brown University. Nationwide topper among 42K students of Brazil entrance exam to UFMG. Twice immigrant from Brazil to US, in 1990s (high school exchange student) and 2000s (PhD and work).

Episode 6. Interview with Rico Malvar, Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft. US National Academy of Engineering Member, and IEEE Fellow. Formerly: Managing Director of Microsoft Research, Chief Scientist for Microsoft Research. Also former Professor in Brazil. Twice immigrant from Brazil to US, in 1980s (PhD) and 1990s (work).

Episode 5. To and fro between Brazil and US. To and fro between industry and academia. Immigration stories from three computer scientists from immigrated from Brazil in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. And went to and fro between being academic faculty and working in industry. Featuring: Rico Malvar (NAE Member, IEEE Fellow, former Microsoft Research Director), Dilma da Silva (Professor at Texas A&M, Co-Founder of Latinas in Computing, former CSE Department Head), Rodrigo Fonseca (Microsoft Research, former Professor). 

Episode 4. Interview with Dejan Milojicic, Distinguished Technologist at Hewlett Packard Labs. IEEE Fellow and ACM Distinguished Scientist. Leader in the Cloud Computing and Middleware Systems community. Immigrant from Yugoslavia to Germany for PhD and then to  US for work in the mid 1990s.