Associate Teaching Professor

As an instructor for SCIS,  Ms. Charters enjoys teaching the courses that start students off in their IT or CS major: COP 1000, COP 2250, COP 3804, and COP 3337. She is passionate about spreading Computer Science education to all children, starting in kindergarten, through elementary, middle, and high school. She also believes that all students at FIU should get a chance to learn how Computer Science impacts their lives, and to dabble in a little bit of coding in languages such as Python and tools like MIT App Inventor. That is why she helped develop a new online course, IDC 1000 – Computer Science for Everyone, which is designed for students who are non-CS and non-IT majors. She would like all students at FIU to consider taking IDC 1000.

Prior to teaching at FIU, Ms. Charters had 2 other careers.  Most recently, she was an educator and teacher-trainer within the Miami-Dade County Public School District.   Her first career was as a Computer Programmer/Analyst for FPL, where she developed mainframe and client/server systems. She is an FIU alumni, and feels blessed to be able to work in SCIS as an Instructor, after having graduated from FIU with a degree in Computer Science many years ago.

Dr. Trevor Cickovski received his Ph.D. from the University of Notre Dame in 2008. He holds Graduate Faculty status and specializes in teaching hardware and Unix coursework, and is IRB-certified and a member of the Bioinformatics Research Group (BioRG) at FIU. He also is a member of the ACM, IEEE, and the National Learning Assistant Alliance (LAA).

Before coming to FIU Trevor was Discipline Coordinator of Computer Science at Eckerd College, instructing a variety of computer science and cross-disciplinary liberal arts courses. He has received three teaching excellence awards, from the FIU College of Engineering (2019), FIU Knight Foundation School of Computing and Information Sciences (2017), and from Notre Dame as a graduate instructor (2006). Trevor was named a Center for the Advancement of Teaching (CAT) fellow in 2019, participating in a University-wide effort to improve teaching evaluation and developing a website for CAT referenced in Panther180. He has received funding from Nvidia to bring GPU computing to the classroom.

Trevor is passionate about health and explores roles played the microbiome in maintaining homeostasis. Microbiomes have enormous influence given their ubiquity and involvement in host metabolic reactions. He has explored connections with ADHD, A1AD, COPD, smoking, and red tides using multi-omics approaches that integrate DNA, RNA and metabolites through large-scale processing, GPUs, and network analyses. He has several peer-reviewed publications including JMM, LNBI, Bioinformatics, BMC, ICCABS, IWBBIO, and ACM TCBB. He has received funding from NIJ (epigenetics), and NSF (machine learning and Covid-19 vaccine discovery). Trevor is lead software developer of PluMA, facilitating natural progress by allowing construction of new ideas as plugins in a choice programming language. These can be uniformly tested alongside other plugins and committed to a centralized plugin pool. The PluMA plugin pool has grown from 70 to 225+ plugins from 2019 to 2020, and continues to grow.

Over 35 years as a professional software developer and system software specialist, from mainframes to PCs. Now sharing my passion for technology to help launch the next generation of experts.

Caryl Rahn received her Bachelors degree in Computer Science from the State University of New York College at Potsdam in 1978, and Masters degree in Computer Science from the University of Pittsburgh in 1989. She spent over 20 years working in industry and taught for about 18 years. She is an author on two United States patents written while working at IBM.

Joslyn Smith, an instructor, joined the Knight Foundation School of Computing and Information Sciences, Florida International University in 1997. Joslyn came to FIU with fourteen years of teaching experience from the University of the West Indies, as a lecturer in computer science, in the undergraduate program. Mr. Smith holds an M.S and a B.S in mathematics both from Central Connecticut State University, CT. He earned an M.S degree in computer science from the University of New Brunswick Canada, and a non-degree Certificate in computer science from Clarke University, Massachusetts. Mr. Smith also holds a professional certificate in teacher education from the Mico University College, Jamaica. At FIU, Mr. Smith’s major focus in programming language is the object oriented paradigm. Over the years he has attended many conferences on computer science education. He has served as reviewer for the SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education and has reviewed several manuscripts for major publishers such as McGraw Hill and Prentice Hall.