Dr. Sarah Lee

Dr. Sarah Lee

Director of the School of Computing Sciences and Computer Engineering, University of Southern Mississippi

Sarah Lee joined the faculty at the University of Southern Mississippi in an administrative role as Director of the School of Computing Sciences and Computer Engineering in August 2020. This follows nine years at Mississippi State University (MSU) where she served on the faculty and in leadership roles since 2011, including her most recent appointment as Assistant Department Head in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering.

Since leaving a 19-year information technology career at FedEx to return to academia, Sarah has worked to create awareness and programs that encourage more women to enter computing pathways and persist into computing majors and careers. In 2016, she and Dr. Vemitra White were awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) Inclusion Across the Nation of Communities of Learners of Underrepresented Discoverers in Engineering and Science grant (NSF INCLUDES 1649312). Part of a national initiative to increase U.S. leadership in STEM, the Mississippi Alliance for Women in Computing (MSAWC) engages stakeholders throughout the southern US to leverage, strengthen, and create awareness of existing programs and create new programs for young women in computing across Mississippi. Goals of MSAWC include recruiting women to computing pathways, retaining them in computing degree programs, and assisting them with the transition to the workforce.

Sarah also seeks to encourage students with disabilities on the computing pathway, and has hosted summer interns through the AccessComputing program at the University of Washington and collaborated with The Clovernook Center for the Blind and Visually Impaired to offer a programming workshop for persons with low vision or blindness. In 2015, she was selected by Dow for a Diversity Fellowship through which she mentored MSU engineering students who are members of an underrepresented minority group.

 

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