Owen Astrachan

Owen Astrachan is Professor of the Practice of Computer Science at Duke University, where he is also the department's director of undergraduate studies. He earned an AB degree in Mathematics from Dartmouth College in 1978 (with distinction, Summa Cum-Laude, and Phi Beta Kappa), an MAT in teaching mathematics from Duke in 1979 and MS and Ph.D degrees in computer science from Duke in 1989 and 1992.

He is the author of Astrachan, Owen (2000), A Computer Science Tapestry: Exploring Programming and Computer Science with C++, McGraw Hill, ISBN  . At Duke he won the Richard K. Lublin Distinguished Teaching Award in 2002 for "the ability to engender genuine intellectual excitement, ability to engender curiosity, knowledge of field and ability to communicate that knowledge". He also won the Robert Cox teaching award at Duke in 1995 and an Outstanding Instructor award while teaching for a semester at the University of British Columbia.

Astrachan has won a number of National Science Foundation (NSF) awards. In 2007 he received one of two NSF CISE Distinguished Education Fellow awards recognizing his role "as an accomplished, creative, and innovative leader who serves the nation as a spokesperson and force for change in undergraduate computing education."

This NSF grant and award follows a CAREER award in 1997 to investigate "practical and pedagogical concerns of the computer science and software engineering communities with an integrated approach to the use, learning, and teaching of [design] patterns" an award in 1996 to develop materials in support of "an application oriented, apprenticeship learning approach to the CS2 course" and other NSF awards for developing curricular materials to support education, research, and visualization in 1996 and for developing modules and courses for ubiquitous and mobile computing in 2000.

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