Bethel elected to board of national computing organization

April 10, 2020

Cindy Bethel, a professor in Mississippi State’s department of computer science & engineering, has been elected to serve on the board of directors of the Computing Research Association.

The Computing Research Association is a national organization that works to further innovation by joining with industry, government and academia to strengthen research and advanced education in computing. Bethel will serve a three-year term that runs from July 1, 2020 through June 30, 2023.

Cindy Bethel headshot

Computer science & engineering professor Cindy Bethel

“I am excited to participate with this organization and helping to have an impact on computing research and policies at the national level,” Bethel said. “I have been involved as a participant in programs sponsored by the Computing Research Association since I was a graduate student and it is an honor to be able to be involved and give back to this wonderful organization.”

Bethel’s research focuses on human-robot interaction, interface designs, robotics, human-computer interaction, affective computing, and cognitive science. Specifically, she has helped design robots that aid trauma victims and mobile robots to assist law enforcement and first responders.

Bethel is the director of the Social, Therapeutic, and Robotic Systems (STaRS) Lab and was a 2019 U.S. – Australian Fulbright Senior Scholar at the University of Technology in Sydney, Australia. She was previously a NSF Computing Innovation Postdoctoral Research Fellow (CIFellow) at Yale University.

Bethel holds the Billie J. Ball Endowed Professor in Engineering and has been elected to the Bagley College of Engineering Academy of Distinguished Teachers. She was also recently named as one of 2019’s “30 women in robotics you need to know about” by Robohub.com.

The Bagley College of Engineering is online at www.bagley.msstate.edu and can be found on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube at @msuengineering.

MSU is Mississippi’s leading university, available online at www.msstate.edu.

By Philip Allison