Khoury News

Bethany Edmunds has spent 15 years asking who CS leaves out — and rebuilding it accordingly 

For the second consecutive year, a Khoury professor has earned ACM SIGCSE's Broadening Participation in Computing Education Award. This time it's Bethany Edmunds, who has built her career on making her field more welcoming.

February 25, 2026

by Caroline Baker Dimock

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When Bethany Edmunds talks about broadening participation in computer science, she is not describing a single initiative, policy, or moment. She is describing a philosophy that has shaped nearly every stage of her academic career.  

“This idea that everybody should have a space in computer science is what drives me,” she says. “And that computer science should serve everyone.”  

Those efforts earned Edmunds, Khoury College’s West Coast associate dean of computing programs, the 2026 SIGCSE Award for Broadening Participation in Computing Education. The award recognizes sustained, impactful work to make computing education more inclusive.  

“For about 15 years now, ever since I got my PhD and then started working in academia, I’ve really worked hard to make sure that I look at the systemic barriers to classrooms, starting in my classroom and then expanding from there,” Edmunds explains.  

That framing — systemic barriers, rather than individual shortcomings — has guided Edmunds’ work. Rather than focusing solely on recruiting underrepresented groups like female students and students of color, she has consistently asked deeper questions: Why do certain students feel unwelcome? Why do others leave? What invisible barriers are keeping people out?  

“There are gates that are being kept, that are keeping people out, that make people feel like they don’t belong there,” she says. “And there are ways that we run our classes that are leading to the homogenous group that graduates from computer science.” 

Edmunds has often focused on practical, structural solutions rather than symbolic gestures — rethinking assumptions about computer science students and their needs. This includes reconsidering class schedules and timing, as well as providing childcare at recruitment events. 

In 2019, Edmunds was asked to help do something rare in higher education: build a campus from scratch. As faculty lead for Northeastern’s Vancouver campus, she had the opportunity to design not just curricula, but a space and a culture. Every decision was filtered through the same guiding question: Who might this exclude?  

“It was done with the thought of how do neurodiverse people participate in this environment? How about people for whom English is their second or third or fourth language? How do we make the most of our time together to really focus on the student experience?” she explains. 

The result is a campus that Edmunds considers one of her proudest accomplishments. The campus features master’s programs designed to launch people into the world of technology and computer science, including the Align master’s program for students without a computing background. It also offers classes after traditional work hours and caters to students for whom English is not their first language.   

Edmunds’s motivation for this work is rooted in how computing shapes the world, and how easily design decisions can exclude entire communities.  

“I always feel like computer science is such an important part of our society,” she says. “We make assumptions in our design choices based on our experience. And I think that having a classroom full of different experiences allows us to question those assumptions.” 

She points to real-world consequences when those assumptions go unchallenged, such as “not recognizing how this plays into somebody else’s lived experience can lead to exclusion, marginalization, and lack of participation.” 

This lack of recognition can range from students creating software that requires a certain number of characters for a name to an app that requires a web connection of a certain speed in order to work.   

Beyond campus-wide initiatives, Edmunds has also reshaped individual courses. One of the most meaningful to her was a special-topics software engineering course designed around community partnership.  

“The goal of that class was to do a software project for a community that was very different from our typical group … a marginalized community of some sort,” she notes. 

In one iteration, the class worked with neurodivergent people, including those with intellectual disabilities. The course led to tangible outcomes, including a Chrome extension designed to make the web more accessible for users with dyslexia. But for Edmunds, the deeper impact was pedagogical.  

“What I loved about it was that throughout the process, the students realigned with the customer and recognized how to reach their needs — not just what we assume their needs to be. It’s an exercise in empathy and understanding,” she says. 

Edmunds’s academic background is not in education research, but in machine learning. That technical foundation now underpins much of her advocacy around AI ethics and inclusion — work she has carried out through national advisory roles, conference speaking, and global partnerships, including efforts with the United Nations and the University of Liberia to help launch Liberia’s first master’s program in artificial intelligence.  

Looking ahead, Edmunds is increasingly focused on lifelong learning and rethinking who gets access to computing education, including how to teach people already in industry to implement more inclusive practices in their workplaces. She also says she sees emerging AI tools not as a threat, but as a potential bridge.  

“Some people don’t like the fact that it could take five days to solve a problem,” she says. “So are there ways that we can use AI to have more quick wins [so] people can get excitement from developing computer programs?” 

For Edmunds, broadening participation has never been about a single pathway into computer science. It is continually questioning who the field is built for and who it could serve if designed differently. And for that sustained commitment, the SIGCSE award recognizes not just what she has built, but how many doors she has opened along the way.