Falkinburg, Gopal promoted to Assistant Professors of Practice

Jeff Falkinburg and Bhuvana Gopal
Jeff Falkinburg and Bhuvana Gopal

School of Computing lecturers Jeffrey Falkinburg and Bhuvana Gopal have been promoted to Assistant Professors of Practice.

Falkinburg is a retired U.S. Air Force major who joined the School of Computing in 2018. Prior to joining the school, he taught Air Force ROTC leadership courses at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln and spent three years as an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at the U.S. Air Force Academy. While at the Academy, he was peer-selected for an Electrical and Computer Engineering Department faculty award for outstanding contribution to cadet education. Falkinburg now primarily teaches computer organization and embedded systems courses. He has been a Senior Design tribe lead since 2019, leading and mentoring student teams through their capstone courses. Since 2021, he has served as a faculty sponsor to expand the Husker Scope and Husker STEM VR capstone projects.

After spending more than 15 years in the software industry, Dr. Gopal served as the assistant director of Design Studio in the Raikes School for three years before joining the School of Computing in 2020. She received her master’s degree in computer science from the School of Computing in 2006, and recently earned her Ph.D. in computer science from the School of Computing in 2022. Dr. Gopal has been a tribe lead with the Raikes school Design Studio from 2017-2020 and with Senior Design from 2020-present. She now brings her extensive industry experience into the classroom and teaches software engineering and software security in practice courses. She is also in charge of the school's internship course. In 2021, she was honored with the School of Computing’s Undergraduate Students’ Choice for Outstanding Teaching Award. Her research work in software engineering education has been widely published in prestigious conferences such as ACM SIGCSE, ACM ITICSE, IEEE ICSE, IEEE FIE, IEEE ICST and PPIG.

Congratulations to our faculty on their promotions!