| NEW FACULTY: DIANNA XU
Our series of brief profiles of new tenure-track faculty members continues this week with the Computer Science Program's Dianna Xu.Other profiles in the series:
The debate over women in science, which has been front-page news ever since Harvard University's president Lawrence Summers' controversial remarks in January, is not news to Dianna Xu. "It was the first or second day of graduate school," she says, "and I had just entered the computer lab, which was full of guys. One of them came up to me and asked, very casually, ‘Whose girlfriend are you?’ It was as if the only reason I had to be in that lab was to be someone's girlfriend."
Xu, the new tenure-track professor in the Computer Science program, spent her undergraduate years at Smith College, and received her doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania. Now in her first year as an educator, she teaches two classes. One, Introduction to Computer Science, is a program staple; the other, an upper-level course entitled Video Game Programming, is one she devised herself. "I'm waiting to see what [the students] come up with," she says.
Her own research is equally innovative. Xu has worked closely with a group of archaeologists in South America, who are excavating the remains of a temple that may have been built by a pre-Inca civilization, now lost. Using commercially sold digital cameras rather than delicate and expensive equipment, Xu and her colleagues were able to create a three-dimensional catalog of artifacts based on the natural model of depth perception. "We took two cameras and put them at a fixed distance, then photographed the same object from both angles," Xu explains. "The archaeologists understand it, they can operate the cameras, so it's not a challenge for them — they don’t have to learn a whole new way of doing things."
One of Xu's goals is to inspire more women to choose science as a career, citing the female participation in such fields as "dismal." "Everyone [in the disciplines] knows there's a problem, but nobody knows how to fix it," she says. "How do you get women involved in a male-dominated field? I came into computer science by accident. How many girls are good at this stuff and just don’t know it? The thing about computer science is that, once you take a class, you see that it's not what you thought it was."
— Allison Siegenthaler '07
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