Ellen Spertus

Ellen R. Spertus is an American computer scientist, the Elinor Kilgore Snyder Professor of computer science at Mills College in Oakland, California, and a former senior research scientist at Google. She grew up in Glencoe, Illinois, and at MIT received a bachelor's degree in computer science and engineering in 1990, a master's degree in electrical engineering and computer science in 1992 and a doctorate in 1998, with a thesis entitled ParaSite: mining the structural information on the World-Wide Web. At Google she worked on App Inventor for Android, a block-based development platform with a graphical user interface that lets developers and amateurs create applications for Android, and in 2011 O'Reilly Media published the book App Inventor, which she co-authored with David Wolber, Hal Abelson and Liz Looney. In 2014 she took a sabbatical from Mills to work with Google on the Blockly programming environment. She has written articles on both technical and social subjects, and in 1993 The New York Times profiled her as one of the women who might change the face of the computer industry.