Yael Gertner

I am a Teaching Assistant Professor in Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I teach Fundamentals of Algorithms I and II and Excursions into Computing I and II in the iCAN program, a new graduate certificate program for broadening participation in Computer Science. It is designed as a bridge program for individuals who completed their bachelor's degrees in a field other than computing and wish to either pursue a master's degree in computer science or a professional career involving computing. My research interests are in computer science education in the areas of broadening participation in computing and designing interventions to increase students learning outcomes.

I received my BS and MEng in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT (1997), with masters thesis under the direction of Shafi Goldwasser in Cryptography. I received my PhD in Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania (2003) under the direction of Sampath Kannan in the area of Cryptography. In the field of cryptography, my major contributions are advances in the study of the relative powers of cryptographic primitives and Private Information Retrieval. I then did postdoctoral training with Cynthia Fisher in Psychology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (2003-2006) and was a Beckman Fellow from 2006 to 2009. In the field of language acquisition, my findings were on verb learning and the early development of sentence comprehension. I joined the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as a Teaching Assistant Professor in 2020. My focus is on broadening participation in Computer Science. I have been developing materials and teaching for iCAN.

2340 Siebel Center
ygertner@illinois.edu
(217) 244-6410