COURTESY DUKE UNIVERSITY

Duke University computer science professor Nicki Washington (left) is a Johnson C. Smith University graduate. She leads the Alliance for Identity-Inclusive Computing Education, which was founded with colleague Shaundra Daily (right)  through a $10 million grant from the National Science Foundation.

Nicki Washington Ph.D. is taking a different approach to broadening participation in computer science.

Washington, a Duke University professor of the practice in computer science, and colleague Shaundra Daily, professor of the practice in electrical and computer engineering and computer science, earned $10 million from the National Science Foundation to create strategies to increase entry, retention, and course completion for students from marginalized groups. Funding will be provided over five years to establish the Alliance for Identity-Inclusive Computing Education, or AIICE.

Their projected impact is 525,000 high school students and 35,000 college undergraduates; 7,000 high school computer science teachers; 2,000 postsecondary computer science faculty and staff; 5,000 teaching assistants and 500 computing departments.

AIICE will combine social science and computer science to improve student and educator understanding and knowledge of identity, support computer science educators and leaders in cultivating academic culture that are more inclusive and address policy-driven changes to computer science education.

“We see things like facial recognition technology, surveillance technologies and medical algorithms that disproportionately affect Black people for example,” said Washington, a Johnson C. Smith University graduate. “Students don’t know this. We’re not teaching this in computer science, but there’s so much work in social science that is talking about the ways in which the work we create is harmful and it’s harmful to people based on different identities. It could be race, it could be gender, it can be sexuality as well or class. We need to start teaching students this.”

Washington said she understood the impact of these practices to a degree as a Black woman but attending a liberal arts college like JCSU meant taking more social science courses in order to graduate. AIICE poses the question of what educators can do to better prepare students to rewrite the narrative.

“We all know that there's a lack of representation of people who identify as Black or indigenous, etc.,” Washington said. “This work is also saying we have to address that environment first before we can even address the technology that is developing. We have to make sure the people who are developing the technology not only understand the concept of identity, but also understand what's happening in their work environment is just a microcosm of what's playing out with the technology that they develop, and then also what's happening in their work environment is exactly mirroring what's happening at the undergraduate institution.”

Washington joined Duke’s faculty in 2020, where she created the Cultural Competence in Computing (3C) Fellows Program with Daily and Cecilé Sadler, a Ph.D. student in electrical and computer engineering. The program recently concluded recruiting for its second cohort. An assessment tool will also be deployed as part of AIICE, said Washington, the program’s director.

3C emerged in response to a course Washington created when she arrived at Duke called race, gender, class in computing. As social unrest spread across the country, people began to pay more attention to what Washington and marginalized people had been saying for years. Other faculty were interested in material to teach the course. Instead, she challenged them to become students of social science.

“I had the idea of putting together a development program that over the course of a two-year cohort will prepare other computer science faculty to understand these topics first and understand how these topics like race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, white supremacy, transphobia, homophobia, misogyny and even classism, how do all of those manifest in society,” Washington said. “How do we understand those, and then how do those play out in the computing environment and how can we use those to now build out different initiatives that will target students at their home institutions, because everybody can’t teach a course, but they may want to put something else together in place at their home institution.”

Washington had access to computers growing up in Durham. Her mother is a retired IBM programmer and manager, and her father was a K12 educator and administrator. Both are JCSU alumni.

Washington grew up surrounded by what she described as Durham’s “rich history of Black excellence,” particularly the Hayti community, which urban renewal swept away, but the legacy remains.

“It had a rich community of Black engineers, attorneys, entrepreneurs, educators,” she said. “A lot of those people who I saw in these positions were not just people who I randomly saw. They were my parents, friends, they were the parents of my friends growing up. I was always exposed to all of these ideas of who and what I could be, and basically that my only limit was myself.”

Washington was surrounded by professionals who attended historically Black colleges and universities, but her high school teachers encouraged her to attend Duke or other schools they considered better. Washington, who spent much of her childhood around North Carolina Central University, had no interest in attending a predominantly white school.

“When it came time to go to college, I knew that I wanted to be somewhere where I could thrive and not be held back because of who I am, how I present myself, how I show up in the world and Johnson C. Smith gave me that opportunity and then some, to not only learn, but also to be poured into by people who look like me by everyone from the president to the people who worked in the cafeteria who were genuinely vested in academic success,” she said. “I had this opportunity to learn more than just computer science. We were reading books by bell hooks and Audre Lorde and all of these other great Black social scientists and educators.”

Washington earned her bachelor’s degree from JCSU in 2000, after which she earned a master’s and a Ph.D. from North Carolina State University, to become the first Black woman to earn a Ph.D. in computer science there. Her career included stops at IBM, the Aerospace Corporation, Howard University and Winthrop University. She is no stranger to being the first at something, including becoming Howard’s first Black female computer science professor.  

“We’re back to this idea of representation and why it matters, because even at an HBCU, Howard in 2006 had never had a Black woman faculty member [in that department].”
Starting at Howard allowed Washington to focus on her work and developing her career, as well as serving as an example for Black women in computing. She recalled how even as a student at JCSU, none of her professors were Black women.

“I never saw a Black woman professor in my department,” Washington said. “I had them across campus but not in computing.”

Washington strives to provide context for Black women pursuing computer science, because she knows not everyone grows up with a female figure like her mom to aspire to be like.
“It was important that they had it in me,” Washington said.

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