CSEE alumna Patricia Ordóñez featured in People of ACM interview

CSEE alumna Patricia Ordóñez featured in People of ACM interview

Every month ACM, the oldest and largest professional society devoted to computing, features an interview with two of its nearly 100,000 members from more than 100 countries. In July, UMBC CSEE alumna Patricia (Patti) Ordóñez in its People of ACM series. Dr. Ordóñez received her Ph.D. in Computer Science in 2012 for a dissertation jointly supervised by Professors Tim Oates and Marie desJardin on Multivariate Time Series Analysis of Physiological and Clinical Data.

After receiving her Ph.D. in 2012, she joined the University of Puerto Rico Río Piedra as an Assistant Professor and was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 2017. She has continued doing research on applying machine learning to problems in the healthcare domain and now focuses on using visual analytics, data mining, machine learning, visualization, and human-computer interaction to medicine and assistive technologies. One of her research goals is to help medical providers create better diagnosis and treatment plans by learning from the data of previous patients with similar conditions.

Dr. Ordóñez followed a nontraditional path to earning her Ph.D. in Computer Science. After getting her undergraduate degree from Johns Hopkins University, she worked for many years as a math and Spanish K-12 teacher and also as a part-time technical trainer for computing courses. She has been very active in supporting efforts to diversify the field of computing. She is is the Program Chair for the 2021 CMD-IT/ACM Richard A. Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing Conference also the Co-chair of ACM’s Diversity and Inclusion Council.

Read more about her experiences in the ACM interview.