Colorado School of Mines professor wants more women in computer science

Tracy Camp, a computer science professor at the Colorado School of Mines, believes in her field’s power to drive universal innovation.

“Think of what computer science has done for our world,” Camp, a computer science professor at Mines, said. “Online shopping, medical applications, robotic surgeries, DNA mapping — all that stuff has been created or vastly improved because of computer science.”

Camp has been at Mines since 1998 and has steadily risen from assistant to full professor. She teaches the school’s introduction to programming course, Programming Concepts in C++.

After receiving her Ph.D. in computer science from the College of William and Mary, Camp went to the University of Alabama, but after a few years headed to Colorado with her husband. Camp tends to focus on three areas when not teaching – technical research, educational research and women in computing. 

The lack of women in her field is something she has worked on while at Mines.

“Research shows that a diverse team creates a better product, so we need diverse teams. And to accomplish that, we need more women at the table,” she said. “We’re currently at about 13 percent female computer science undergraduate students at Mines, which is a bit less than the roughly 15 percent national average. My goal is to move Mines to 25 percent women in both the computer science major and the computer science minor by 2020.”