Meet the Faculty

Curt Schurgers 

Curt Schurgers received his Ph.D. from UCLA in integrated circuits and systems, and his MS in EE from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium (KUL). Before coming to UCSD in 2002, he was a postdoctural associate at MIT. He has also held a research position at the Interuniversity Microelectronics Center (IMEC) in Belgium. From 2004 until 2010, he was an Assistant Professor in the UCSD ECE Department, leading the Wireless Information Systems Lab. In 2010, he became a Development Engineer at the UCSD Qualcomm Institute, supervising the Prototyping Lab. Since July 2017, he has been a Teaching Professor in the UCSD Electrical and Computer Engineering Department. In addition to teaching introductory engineering and programming classes and developing new pedagogy for them, he is also a co-Director of the Engineers for Exploration program. In this program, undergraduate students build new tools for ecologists, archaeologists and explorers, and then assist them in deploying these technologies all over the world.

Soohyun Nam Liao

Soohyun Nam Liao re-joined UCSD in 2021 as assistant teaching professor of The Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute, two years after receiving her PhD in Computer Science and Engineering from UCSD. She was one of the first PhDs whose primary research was in computing education. Her research has been focusing on how to scale its education to serve hundreds of students effectively in its lower-division computer science courses Before coming back to UCSD she worked as teaching faculty at Princeton University where she adapted a variety of scalable evidence-based practices in her classrooms including collaborative learning, interdisciplinary learning, and/or personalized learning. She also worked with a San-Francisco-based non-profit organization named AI4All as a lead instructor of multiple programs. She is passionate in improving accessibility and equity of early computing education.

Shirley Miranda - Teacher Fellow

Shirley earned her B.S. in Computer Engineering at UCSD and worked as a software development engineer creating front-end and back-end business software for government and private industry. Her continued volunteer work with high school students through the Greater San Diego Science and Engineering Fair (GSDSEF) inspired her to go into teaching. At the University of San Diego, she earned her M.Ed. focusing on technology in education. She has taught Statistics 1-2, AP Statistics, Robotics and AP Computer Science at Morse High School and currently has a computer science and engineering lab at Morse High where students throughout the district visit for CS experiences.  She also visits elementary schools to provide CS experiences for TK-5 students.  She has been a Teacher Fellow at UCSD COSMOS since 2007. She has served as the Director of the GSDSEF (1999-2016), a member of the COSMOS Advisory Board and on the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair’s Advisory Council. She has been recognized with the 2014 National Council of Women and Information Technology (NCWIT) Educator Award for her contributions to the computer science educational community. Additionally, she is the 2016 San Diego County Teacher of the Year. She currently is working at the San Diego Unified School District’s Career and Technical Education (CCTE) Department to create computer science education and experiences for transitional kindergarten through twelfth grade students. In 2018, she was appointed by the California State Superintendent of Instruction to the Computer Science Implementation Plan Panel submitted a plan to roll out K-12 computer science education in California. Shirley spends her free time writing and visiting the San Diego Zoo with her husband and young daughter (who loves to code). She has published four books Falling, Winter Solstice, Wintering, and Springing of her Bits and Pieces series (found on Amazon.com). She is currently writing her fifth book of the series. She has been a COSMOS Teacher Fellow since 2007 for Cluster 1 and is excited to launch Cluster 12.