Charles Isbell

Dr. Charles Isbell is currently The John P. Imlay Dean of the College of Computing at Georgia Tech. Throughout his career, Dr. Isbell has continued to focus on issues of broadening participation in computing, and is the founding Executive Director for the Constellations Center for Equity in Computing. Dr. Isbell takes a data-driven approach to bring about his vision of broadening participation in computing. This approach provided motivation for launching the LEAP Alliance.

Dr. Isbell’s varied research interests are unified by the theme of using machine learning to build autonomous agents who engage directly with humans. His work has been featured in the popular press, congressional testimony, and in several technical collections. In addition, Dr. Isbell has pursued reform in computing education, including as the chief architect of Threads, Georgia Tech’s structuring principle for computing curricula. He also led the creation of Georgia Tech’s first-of-its-kind MOOC-supported M.S. in Computer Science, now the largest in the country.

Dr. Charles Isbell is a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of AI (AAAI), a Fellow of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM), and an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Isbell has received multiple awards for his efforts to diversify computing, including the recent Computing Research Association’s A. Nico Habermann Award. He received his bachelor’s degree in Information and Computer Science from Georgia Tech, and his M.S. and Ph.D. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s AI Lab. Upon graduation, he worked at AT&T Labs/Research. In 2002, he returned to Georgia Tech to join the faculty as an Assistant Professor, where he has served many roles since.