Neena Thota Named ACM Senior Member for Technical Leadership and Professional Contributions
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Neena Thota, senior teaching faculty and associate chair of teaching development at the UMass Amherst Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS), has been named a senior member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).
The Senior Member Grade recognizes ACM members with at least ten years of professional experience and five years of professional membership, who have demonstrated performance through technical leadership and significant technical or professional contributions.
Thota has been a member of the ACM and the Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE) since 2009. Her professional contributions to CS Education (CSEd) include co-founding the Learning and Teaching in Computing and Engineering (LaTiCE) Conference and chairing multiple doctoral consortia for CSEd graduate students. Her research focuses on computing education research, educational technologies, learning and assessment taxonomies, and methodological frameworks for research. Her scholarship has appeared in leading journals and ACM conference proceedings, and she has collaborated internationally on studies of computing education practices.
Thota joined the CICS faculty in 2016. Her leadership includes serving as co-principal investigator on multiple federally funded projects, such as an NSF initiative to design culturally relevant computational thinking assessments for early elementary students, and a Sloan Foundation–funded project to expand and diversify pathways from undergraduate to graduate studies in computer science and engineering. She also contributes nationally to the adoption of parallel and distributed computing curricula through her work with the NSF-supported Center for Parallel and Distributed Computing Curriculum Development.
At CICS, Thota directs the Early Research Scholars Program, which provides structured opportunities for undergraduates to engage in research, and serves as education lead for the NSF Expeditions in Computing project on Computational Decarbonization of Societal Infrastructures. She has collaborated internationally on studies of computing education practices across cultures.
Thota has also received multiple recognitions for her work at UMass Amherst, including being named a 2024-25 Chancellor’s Leadership Fellow, a 2023-24 Faculty Fellow with the Institute of Diversity Sciences, and a lead for education initiatives within major research collaborations.
