Jessen Havill

Jessen Havill has been teaching Computer Science at Denison University since 1998, from introductory classes to advanced electives in Algorithm Design, Operating Systems, and Computational Biology. In 2013, he was awarded Denison's highest teaching honor, the Charles A. Brickman Teaching Excellence Award. Prior to Denison, Dr. Havill earned his Ph.D. at The College of William and Mary.

Dr. Havill thoroughly enjoys developing new interdisciplinary courses in collaboration with colleagues in other disciplines. These initiatives serve to promulgate the wealth of fascinating computational problems, and erode the field's technical and narrow reputation. His textbook, Discovering Computer Science: Interdisciplinary Problems, Principles, and Python Programming, originated from an introductory computer science course that he began teaching in 2009.

Dr. Havill is also an active researcher, with an interest in the development and analysis of online algorithms for various problems in scheduling and network routing. In addition, he has collaborated with colleagues in biology and geosciences to develop computational tools to support research and teaching in those fields. Over the years, he has also collaborated with almost thirty Denison students on these projects.