Dr. Bryant York

of Bryant York earned the A.B. in Mathematics from Brandeis University (1967), the M.S. in Management from MIT (1971), the M.S. (1976) and Ph.D. (1981) in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts – Amherst.  He was a Research Staff Member at the IBM San Jose Research Labs (1979-1983), a Consulting Engineer at Digital Equipment Corporation’s Artificial Intelligence Center (1983-1986), associate professor of computer science at Boston University (1986 – 1991) and Northeastern University (1991 – 2001), and professor of computer science at Portland State University (2001 – 2019). He also served as a program officer at the National Science Foundation (1990-1991); served on the advisory committee to the Computer Information Science and Engineering Directorate (CISE) of NSF (1992-1998, 2002-2006); and served on the advisory committee to the Education and Human Resources Directorate (EHR) of NSF (2008 – 2014).

 Some achievements of which he is very proud of include: being the MVP of the Charles St. Giants baseball team (1957); helping to build the Hilltop Center, one of the nation’s first Head Start Programs in Roxbury, MA (1965); teaching adult literacy for Dr. Leon Sullivan’s Opportunities Industrialization Centers (1966 – 1968); teaching mathematics to incarcerated minorities at Pittsfield State Prison (1975) through the UMASS University Without Walls Program; co-designing and implementing the Programming by Ear (PBE) system for blind programmers (1985); co-organizing the first NSF Workshop on Computers and Persons with Disabilities (1989); organizing/executing the Banneker High School Computer Programming Contest (1991); organizing the first NSF Workshop on Minorities in Computing (1995); co-founding the African American Scholars for Citizenship and Society (AASCC, 1997); co-founding the Institute for African American eCulture (IAAeC, 2000); being the lead principal investigator on the NSF grant “New Approaches to Human Capital Development through Information Technology Research” (2000-2006, the first NSF/CISE grant with 5 African American co-PIs), co-founding the Richard A. Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing conference series (2001); co-designing the NSF Broadening Participation in Computing program (2004); co-founding the Academic Careers Workshops (2005); co-founding the Center for Minorities and People with Disabilities (CMD-IT, 2010).