Jodi Tims

The contributions of Jodi Tims to the activities of ACM over the past two decades have spanned three major areas: promoting diversity in computer science education, expanding ACM’s support for women in computing, and broadening the scope of ACM’s commitment to computing education.
Tims’s contributions to ACM began with SIGCSE, where she took on a series of roles in the world’s largest conference for computer science educators. In addition to conference management roles, she worked to keep registration costs low and regularize travel support for students by fostering closer, multi-year collaborations with conference sponsors.
She soon expanded her involvement to include work with ACM-W. Founded in 2006 to support and advocate for women, the organization was still focused on chapters within the U.S., so Tims made it a personal mission to expand ACM-W’s reach internationally. In 2012, she joined the ACM-W executive council and took charge of the Celebrations of Women in Computing project, which supports regional conferences of women in technology across industry, academia, and government; ACM-W helps with event organization and provides guidance on obtaining corporate and regional financial support. Tim’s efforts expanded as she became Vice-Chair and then Chair of ACM-W. Under her leadership, both the Celebrations and the student and professional chapters grew significantly, particularly in Europe and India. The Celebrations now represent some of the world’s largest gatherings focused on women in computing, and there are now 200 student and professional chapters across the globe.
In parallel with these efforts, Tims became actively involved with ACM’s Education Board. As department chair at a non-PhD-granting university, Jodi was interested in seeing data about peer departments collected and reported, much as the CRA does for PhD-granting departments in its annual Taulbee Survey. She was the impetus behind what became the “ACM NDC Study”, a 10-year effort that gathered enrollment, degree, and salary data directly from undergraduate programs at non-doctoral universities. The results — published annually in ACM Inroads — not only included gender and race/ethnicity information but also comparisons with similar data reported in the Taulbee Survey. The NDC effort was later merged into a larger project on Actionable Computing Enrollment and Retention (ACER), to which Tims continues to contribute. Her dedication to these efforts elevated the visibility of non-doctoral institutions within ACM and has fostered greater equity across the computing education landscape.