About the WLA staff

Dan Garcia is a Lecturer SOE in the Computer Science Division of the EECS Department at the University of California, Berkeley, and joined the Cal faculty in the fall of 2000. He has won the departmental Diane S. McEntyre Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2002, the departmental Information Technology Faculty Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in 2004, and was chosen as a UC Berkeley "Unsung Hero" in 2005. He has taught (or co-taught as a GSI, where he won both departmental and campus outstanding GSI awards) courses in teaching techniques, computer graphics, virtual reality, computer animation, self-paced programming as well as the lower-division introductory curriculum. He is active in SIGCSE and is a member of the ACM Education Board.

He is currently mentoring over seventy undergraduates spread across four groups he founded in 2001 centered around his research and development interests in computer graphics, Macintosh OS X programming, combinatorial game theory and computer science education. He also recently co-developed a computing course for all freshman engineers. Dan received his Ph.D. and MS in Computer Science from UC Berkeley in 2000 and 1995, and dual BS degrees in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1990.

On the fun side, he can dance DDR level 7, juggle 5 balls, score in the low 90s on the links, spin things on his finger and knows all the words to many old-school raps, stand-up comedy bits and Monty Python sketches. He also has a collection of several hundred game and puzzle books, and terribly enjoys sharing good brain teasers or playing any one of his many exotic board games with students who drop by during open office hours.

His wife Tao is also a UC Berkeley Computer Science alumni, and they have a young son Yuan (pronounced like U.N.) born in the summer of 2005.

Sean Carr graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in May 2007 with a Bachelor of Arts in Computer Science. Sean has worked on developing the framework for WLA's topic based course outlines. He is currently working on improvements to the system as well as passing on knowledge to the next generation of WLAers. Sean was also involved for several years in the GamesCrafters research group at UC Berkeley. He specializes in general web development and databases. After graduating Sean started working at Rapleaf. His personal site is www.seancarr.net. See Sean's reputation on Rapleaf.

Sameer Iyengar is an entering EECS graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley. He is very involved with Eta Kappa Nu, the EECS honors society, and has a strong interest in teaching. He has been a TA for the CS61C course at Berkeley and has remained active in teaching projects such as the Weiner Lecture Archives.

Hava Edelstein is an aspiring CS major at the University of California, Berkeley, and is currently working on the 61A portion of WLA. She spent several years working on the development team of a little web authoring program called Dreamweaver before deciding that pursuing a more formal computer science education was in her future. A recipient of the Regents' and Chancellor's Scholarship, Hava hopes to spend her time at Berkeley both learning about the the exciting world of computer science, and making that world as accessible as possible to anyone, anywhere, who wants to learn, formal student or otherwise. In her spare time, Hava is something of a cinephile, an unabashed reddit junkie, and a comp.lang.scheme devotee.

Albert Liu is an EECS undergraduate at UC Berkeley. He is working on the CS61C portion of WLA. He plays baritone for the Cal Band, and is involved with Eta Kappa Nu and Tau Beta Pi. In his leisure time, he enjoys computer games, play-by-post roleplaying games, and programming the occasional Java doodad.

Gene Zhang is an EECS major at the University of California, Berkeley and is involved with the Berkeley Objectivism Club as well as the Weiner Lecture Archives. He plans to make the most of his years at college by doing productive work, while still making time to play the piano and video games. He is working on implementing the user interface for the main page of WLA.

Cassandra Guy is one of the graphic designers for the Weiner Lecture Archives. An EECS major at Berkeley, she is involved with the Daily Californian, AUWICSEE, and GamesCrafters. She hopes to become involved with research in Artificial Life and Intelligence while still at school, and plans to get her masters. www.geocities.com/cassandralguy

Matthew Ng is a web design instructor at the Methodist Community Center, a Sunday School Teacher at the Chinese Epworth Methodist Church, and a student majoring in computer science at Berkeley. He wants to work as a web developer or a software engineer while maintaining his hobbies in music production. DDR, web design, and java programming are a few of his other hobbies which he hopes continue. For the WLA, Matthew is helping to implement the user interface.
www.djlmk.com

Babak Pahlavan is an EECS major at UC Berkeley. He is a Senior Programmer at PhdComputing in charge of system development for online services and Managing/Creating Databases. Babak is also involved in Persian communities promoting Iranian engineers, where he tries to create channels in which fellow engineers can find connections, and is a member of SIEB (Society of Iranian Engineers at Berkeley), ISCO and ISAA. A winner of the Cal Bear scholarship and the Junior College regent?s scholarship, he is interested in continuing his education by going to graduate school and would like to eventually start his own company. While balancing his schedule he still finds time to play video games and work out as well as contribute technical skills regarding PHP and database systems to the WLA.
http://www.icarrots.com
http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~babakp/sieb

Jun Kitagawa, who is working on most of the CSS style and layout of the WLA site, is a pure mathematics major at the UC Berkeley. He is the vice president and webmaster of the Cal Japan Club, enjoys math and playing Soul Caliber 2. He hopes to play the Jazz Saxophone again, and in the meantime wants to go to graduate school, get a Ph.D., and possibly work on some research at a university.

Aaron Steele received his bachelors in Computer Science (L&S) from U.C. Berkeley and now serves as Programmer/Analyst in the department of Integrative Biology where he works on NSF funded bio-diversity informatics research. Aaron was invited to join the WLA team in fall 2003 by Dr. Dan Garcia, and helped with the initial functional requirements analysis for the archive.

Steven Chan is a Computer Science & Integrative Biology and UC Berkeley. He is a member of the UC Berkeley Undergraduate Graphics Group, Upsilon Pi Epsilon, and the Pre-Med Honor Society. He also tutors in science for the Student Learning Center and is a design consultant for the WLA. Graphics are his main concern, being his hobby, his work, and his plan for life.
www.firastudios.com