About me

I am originally from Río Piedras, Puerto Rico. In this website, you can find information about my work, some of my personal hobbies, and other random and useless pieces of information.

I am a Professor in the Department of Software and Information Systems in the College of Computing and Informatics at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. From July 2015-June 2019, I was Associate Dean of the College of Computing and Informatics. I served as a Faculty Fellow (2019-2021) at the Graduate School working on graduate funding and later in diversity initiatives. I am currently serving as Program Officer at NSF in the EWF Cluster.

I graduated from la Academia Nuestra Señora de la Providencia in Cupey, Clase 80! Attended Ball State in Muncie, Indiana (David Letterman calls it the Harvard of Muncie) where I completed a B.A. and an M.S. Then I attended The George Washington University, Washington DC where I completed my D.Sc. I worked 6 years at the Naval Research Lab and did a 1 semester Visiting Professor at the US Naval Academy, Annapolis, MD. I taught 4 years at University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez and then moved to Virginia Tech in 2000. I have been at UNCC since July 2015. During January of 2022, I was a visiting Professor at Northeastern, working in the Center for Inclusive Computing.

At Virginia Tech, I was Associate Dean of the Graduate School and Director of the Office of Recruitment and Diversity Initiatives. I was also Associate Department Head and Director for Graduate Studies in the Department of Computer Science. I served in numerous committees and even a Provost Task Force. I was a founding member of the Hispanic Caucus and a former chair of that group.

You can find my full CV here.

How to Pronounce My Name

Click on the play triangle below to hear a pronunciation of my first name and my surnames. The audio is courtesy of Apple's speech synthetizer, but only if you use one of their Spanish voices.

Wait! Two last names?

I have a writeup about why Latinos use two last names.

How to write the accents

My name has "weird characters" according to people that have never left their house. If your software doesn’t allow you to copy/paste my name from anywhere in the site, you can type the characters directly as follows:

To get...	Mac OS Type this	Windows Type this
é	Option-e followed by e	ALT key type 0233 on the numeric key pad
ñ	Option-n followed by n	ALT key and type 0241 on the numeric key pad
On Windows, the character will appear when you let up the ALT key. If you don’t have a numeric keypad, then you should Google alternative ways to type accents with Windows.

Where are you from?

Depending on how you ask, I am Puertorrican, Caribeño, Hispanic, Latino or American.

• I was born and raised in Puerto Rico, home of the happiest people in the world according to some studies (that are no longer linkable on the web).
• See "What it means to be Latino" to get a better sense of the terms Latino, Hispanic, etc.
• There was a very nice writeup in the Washington Post travel section (Feb 2006) about Puerto Rico, done by four different writers each giving a different perspective of vacationing in Puerto Rico.

Professional Recognitions

I have been fortunate and honored to be recognized for my efforts to increase diversity in computing.

My passions