Altadena resident Nancy Warter-Perez named Outstanding Professor

Cal State L.A. recently announced Nancy Warter-Perez (Altadena resident) as one of the recipients of this year’s Outstanding Professor Awards.

Nancy Warter-Perez, director of the National Science Foundation (NSF) IMPACT LA GK-12 Program at CSULA, is helping to change the image of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) in society by training graduate students to communicate their research to a broad audience, working with middle school teachers to bring research-related STEM activities into their classrooms, and providing a wide-range of opportunities for underrepresented minority students to explore science and engineering careers.

Over the past five years, the IMPACT LA Program has impacted more 5,000 underserved middle and high school students from East Los Angeles.  Her paper on “Strengthening the K-20 Engineering Pipeline for Underrepresented Minorities,” received the 2010 American Society for Engineering Education’s Annual Conference & Exposition PIC IV Best Paper Award.

Warter-Perez is also the recipient of the 2010 CSULA Distinguished Women Award and the NSF Young Investigator Award. Since 1993, Warter-Perez has been awarded close to $6 million to support engineering and educational research and innovative educational programs. In 1994, she established the CSULA Compiler Research Group to study advanced compiler techniques for high-performance processors.

Additionally, Warter-Perez has developed and taught a broad range of computer engineering courses and, since 2000, has co-developed curriculum for training biologists and computer scientists in the emerging field of bioinformatics.

She has published widely on compiler techniques for high-performance computing and on collaborative project based learning (CPBL)—an active learning strategy for engaging students using a tablet-based platform. Her CPBL work has been proven to enhance student retention and persistence in computer engineering. She is currently co-leading an academy to train other STEM faculty on CPBL and other active-learning strategies.

A faculty member at CSULA for 20 years, she has been actively involved in academic governance, having been an academic senator from 2009 to the present and on the Senate Executive Committee. She has served as acting chair for her department in 2005-06, and has served as chair of the Computer Engineering Curriculum Development Committee since 1996. She was also co-chair of a Faculty Retreat Planning Committee in 2004–06. Warter-Perez holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University and an M.S. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.