Dan Garcia

Dan Garcia is a Teaching Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley. A nationally recognized leader in computer science education, he co-developed the Beauty and Joy of Computing (BJC) course, which has been shared with over 500 high school teachers through four National Science Foundation grants. His work emphasizes inclusivity, achieving unprecedented female enrollment rates (up to 65%) in BJC courses.

• ACM Distinguished Educator (2012)
• ACM Distinguished Speaker (2019)
• NCWIT Undergraduate Research Mentoring Award
• UC Berkeley Unsung Hero Award
• LPFI Lux Award
• SAP Visionary Member Award
• Google CS4HS Ambassador

Garcia's research focuses on personalized & adaptive virtual tutors, online education tools, and assessment of computational thinking. He has led the development of the Snap! programming environment and founded student research groups like GamesCrafters, which applies computational game theory to solve board games. His outreach initiatives have received national media coverage in the New York Times, PBS NewsHour, and NPR's All Things Considered.

As a national leader in the "CSforALL" movement, he co-chairs the higher education subcommittee of the CSforCA state initiative. Garcia has served on the ACM Education Board, the College Board Computer Science Principles Development Committee, and held leadership roles at ACM SIGCSE conferences, including Program Co-Chair (2017) and Symposium Co-Chair (2018).