Allen Downey, Ph.D
Associate Professor of Computer Science

781-292-2558
allen.downey@olin.edu

Before coming to Olin, Dr. Allen Downey taught at Colby College and Wellesley College, and held research positions at the San Diego Supercomputer Center and Boston University. He received his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of California/Berkeley in 1997, with a dissertation on operating system support for large-scale parallel computation. His undergraduate and master's degrees are from MIT, in civil engineering.

Dr. Downey is the author of several textbooks, including three versions of "How to Think Like a Computer Scientist," an introduction to computer science using Java, C++, or Python. These books are available under the GNU Free Documentation License, which means that teachers are free to copy and modify the text as well as contribute material. In 2001, Dr. Downey founded Green Tea Press to print and distribute free textbooks.

Dr. Downey has enjoyed teaching since his first year of graduate school, and is active with the ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE). He has developed novel classes in operating systems and scientific computation. Dr. Downey believes that engineering and computer science are a valuable part of a broad, liberal education, and that the thinking skills students develop at Olin are ideal preparation for the 21st century.
 
 
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