Sneha Veeragoudar Harrell

Sneha Veeragoudar Harrell, PhD is a senior research fellow in the College of Information and Computer Science at UMass Amherst. She is currently leading the equity and diversity efforts for the UMass-SPS CSforAll Springfield RPP. Previously as a research scientist at MIT, her research catalyzed youth excitement about computing as a means of empowerment, problem solving, and self-expression. She served as the learning sciences expert on an NSF funded project investigating relations between virtual and physical world social identities in computer science learning.

Prior to that, she directed critical ethnography research projects in California and Georgia, using virtual worlds and environments as sites of computational literacy interventions. These interventions took place at alternative school for students expelled from the mainstream and an independent school for refugee girls. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship with TERC, a Cambridge-based non-profit STEM education research think tank.

Harrell earned her PhD in cognition and development at the University of California, Berkeley in the Graduate School of Education. She is co-chair of the Social Sciences Advisory Board for the National Center for Women in Information Technology.