Cynthia Brown

Cynthia Brown received a Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of Michigan in 1977, but she was already captivated by computers. She spent most of her career as an academic, teaching at Indiana University, Northeastern, and Portland State University. She was also a Member of Technical Staff at GTE laboratories and wrote a newsletter about technical analysis of bond futures for Thompson Financial. She served as Dean of the College of Computer Science at Northeastern and as Chair of the Computer Science Department at Portland State.

In recent years Professor Brown has focused on teaching programming to non-computer science majors using VBA, the programming language built into Excel and other Microsoft products. She is very interested in making the concepts of programming accessible and interesting to a broader audience that includes more women and people who might not initially see themselves in a technical role. She is currently retired and living in Portland, Oregon.