Dr. Patricia Ordóñez
Associate Professor, University of Puerto Rico Rio Piedras; co-Chair, Diversity and Inclusion Council of ACM; State Lead, ECEP
Twitter: @patti_ordonez
Patricia Ordóñez is a tenured Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Puerto Rico Río Piedras. She received her BA from Johns Hopkins University and her MS and PhD in Computer Science from the University of Maryland Baltimore County. She is the first Latina to graduate with a PhD from the Department of Computer Science and the College of Engineering and Information Technology at UMBC and the first woman promoted to Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department at UPR-Río Piedras (UPR-RP).
Clinical Informatics, Assistive Technology and Computer Science Education Research Her dissertation research centered on using visualization, machine learning, and data mining (visual analytics) to improve the state of medicine in intensive care units. She is currently developing assistive technologies for programming by creating a voice programming language. She is co-Lead for the Exploring Computing Education Pathways(ECEP) for Puerto Rico, created a Google CS4HS MOOC for integrating computational thinking in the curriculum of high schools in Puerto Rico, and co-led the Spanish translation of the Exploring Computer Science (ECS) and the implementation of the Professional Development of ECS in public schools in Puerto Rico over the last three years, which has trained from 17 to 32 teachers each year. She help to bring the Mobile Computer Science Principles Advanced Placement course to Puerto Rico, which provided training to 24 teachers with the National Center for Computer Science Education.
Broadening Participation in Computing, Data Science, and Health Informatics, and Mentoring She is co-PI of a National Institute of Health R-25 which promotes the informal training of students and faculty in Puerto Rico in Biomedical Data Science (BDS), Increasing Diversity in Interdisciplinary Research in Big Data to Knowledge (IDI-BD2K). With this grant, she developed several BDS initiatives in Puerto Rico such as the Hacking Health in the Caribbean hackathon, the CRA-W Biomedical Data Science Workshop, and the Healthcare Innovation Replicathon to name a few and is developing a data science program at the UPRRP. She is also co-PI of the NSF-funded Interdisciplinary and Quantitative Biology REU where she trains biologists and computer scientists to become computational scientists. She is the founder of the Symposium of Health Informatics in Latin America and the Caribbean (SHILAC) and co-founder of Computer Science for All Puerto Rico, an intersectoral organization to promote the integration of computational thinking and a high-quality computer science curriculum in all the schools of Puerto Rico, and Women in Data Science Puerto Rico. She is a former National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow and annually gives workshops on how to fund your graduate education because she is passionate about promoting equity in access to high quality education and healthcare. She is a founding member of the ACM-Women North America Committee and is serving as Program Chair at the 2021 Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing Conference this year.
