Staff
For a quicker response on homework or project help, please ask on Piazza rather than emailing staff members individually. On Piazza, all staff members can see your question and answer it.
Instructors
Alex Krentsel
I graduated from UC Berkeley with a degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and a degree in Music. I’m a software engineer at Google, working on YouTube. This semester, I’m taking a sabbatical from my work at Google to come teach this class full-time. You can learn more about me at www.krentsel.com. I’m playing violin in the Howard orchestra this semester.
Vijay Chaudhary
I am a 4th year graduate student at Howard University working with Prof. Danda B. Rawat in the CWiNs lab. My research works mostly involve wireless virtualization and cyber physical systems. For this academic year, I am working as an adjunct lecturer in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department. If you have any questions regarding graduate or undergraduate research in computer science, I’d be happy to chat with you about it.
Howard Teaching Assistants
Bradon Thymes
bradon.thymes@bison.howard.edu
My name is Bradon Thymes. I am interested in machine learning, computer vision, and mobile app development. I have researched at Iowa State University in virtual reality, and at the University of Maryland in machine learning. If you have any questions about computer science research, I am happy to share my experience with you!
Dindu Alim
chidindu.alim@bison.howard.edu
Hi everyone, I’m Chidindu (Dindu) Alim. I’m currently interested in Product Management, Human-Computer interactions, Machine Learning and Gamification. I’ve been carrying out research since my freshman year at the ABL lab here at Howard University. Also, I’ve had a Software engineering internship at Uber and a Software engineering and product management internship at Microsoft. I’m happy to share more of my experience so far with you!
Deontae Smith
deontae.smith@bison.howard.edu
My name is Deontae Smith, I am a computer science major from Baton Rouge, LA. I am a former Google Intern, and current NSBE member. Last summer, as a STEP Intern, I worked on an amazing technical project, which has help find my passion in becoming a software engineer.
Jonathan Flores
jonathan.flores@bison.howard.edu
My name is Jonathan Flores. I am a sophomore international student at Howard University majoring in Computer Science. I am from Trinidad and Tobago (an island in the Caribbean). I am still figuring out what path I want to take in Computer Science. I am willing to answer any questions about by journey so far in Computer Science, especially as it relates to my experience as an international student.
Google Teaching Assistants
Aditya Mithas
Hello all, my name is Aditya Mithas and I am a software engineer at Google. I have been working on the Google Assistant (“Hey Google, …”) for almost two years, and previously contributed to Google Cloud efforts. I grew up not far from you all, in Montgomery County, Maryland, and am now based out of New York City.
I’m incredibly excited to work with all of you this fall, and am looking forward to helping you achieve your goals in academics and the industry.
Ari Chivukula
Ari works on the Chrome web-browser on web-standards. They’ve previously worked for Facebook and the US Department of Defense.
Derrill Dabkoski
Hi, I’m Derrill and I’ve been a programmer at Google since 2014, currently working on software that manages our data centers. I graduated from college back in 2002, and I’ve been a programmer ever since. I’m originally from SF, but I just moved to NYC. I’m eager to be as helpful as I can!
Erty Seidhol
Erty is an engineer at Google on an internal tools team. Prior to Google, he’s worked at lots of companies from small startups to large research labs. He was the GIR instructor at Howard in 2020.
Greg Moon
Hello all! I am a SWE on the Cloud Code for IntelliJ team located in NYC. Our team focuses on making it easy for individual developers, software development teams, and whole enterprises to use GCP and cloud native development practices in general without having to context switch between the GCP Console and an IDE or understand some of the complicated tools involved. Prior to Google, I worked for a couple startups and then WeWork (which, if you’ve seen any of the reporting or the documentary, you’ll know was quite the experience). Right now I’m working on developer tools of course, but in the past I’ve worked primarily on full stack web development and devops projects, so have some experience there that might be helpful too. Looking forward to meeting and working with everyone!
If you email me, please put [CSCI-100] in the subject line.
Matthew Sit
Hi everyone! I’m a software engineer at Google, working on the test infrastructure for the UI frameworks of the YouTube mobile apps. I’m born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area and I studied computer science at UC Berkeley, where I taught the data structures course and graduated in 2019. I enjoy bouldering and a warm mug of London Fog.
Richard Peña
Hey all! My name is Richard - I grew up in Redondo Beach, CA and went to community college before graduating from University of California, San Diego in 2020. I started my career at Google immediately after graduation and am currently WFH in Irvine, CA. I am discovering a passion for helping out students with mock interviews, tutoring, hackathon mentorship, etc. Hope to see you all in my Office Hours at some point - no technical questions required.
If you email me, please put [CSCI-100] in the subject line.
Rob Varghese
Hi, I’m Robinson Raju Varghese. You can call me Rob or Robinson. I’ve been in software development and engineering management for close to 20 years, mostly focused on e-commerce and Payments. In the last 5 years, I’ve been studying and doing some research on Security. I graduated with a Masters in Computer Science from San Jose State. I enjoyed doing research on IoT security during this time. I’m currently working on Google Cloud Security, focused on the Zero Trust platform.
I live in California (SF Bay Area) with my wife and our little puppy. I love to go on hikes and long walks and visits to the beach occasionally. I like to read and watch sci-fi books and TV series. Awaiting Dune, Foundation & The Wheel of Time series. Looking forward to learning and getting to know you this fall.
Sonam Benakatti
Hi all! I’m a Software Engineer in Google’s NYC office, working on features related to education within YouTube. I’ve previously worked on Ads and Search. I’m originally from Texas and I went to UT Austin (I started college with zero knowledge in Computer Science), interned at Google twice, then returned full time! I’m a beginner rock climber but spend a lot of my free time trying to improve. Looking forward to meeting you all :)