SFSU Computer Science Graduation Celebration 2026

To celebrate the achievements of our Computer Science students, the CS Department will hold a Graduation Celebration for all CS undergraduates and graduates who earned their degrees during the 2025-2026 academic year. Students will receive a certificate for their achievement during the ceremony. The Associate Dean in the College of Science and Engineering, Dr. Teaster Baird, will address our graduates. This year's commencement speaker is Dr. Candace Thille of Stanford University, Director for workforce and adult learning in the Stanford Accelerator for Learning and Associate Professor of Education and Neuroscience. The ceremony will also feature remarks by a fellow student speaker.

The Department of Computer Science welcomes persons with disabilities and will provide reasonable accommodations upon request. Requests for reasonable accommodations for this event should contact [email protected] no later than May 15th.

Dr. Teaster Baird is an Associate Dean in the College of Science & Engineering at San Francisco State University (SFSU). A native of Ashland, Mississippi, Dr. Baird earned his BS in chemistry from Tougaloo College in Mississippi, and his PhD in biochemistry from Duke University in North Carolina. After graduate school, Dr. Baird did a postdoc at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and then joined the faculty in the Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry at SFSU. Dr. Baird takes great pride and receives great pleasure in teaching and training others. In 2015, Dr. Baird was awarded the SFSU Excellence in Teaching Award, and he has served as teaching mentor for several UCSF postdocs. Dr. Baird was instrumental in launching SF BUILD, an NIH-funded partnership between SFSU and UCSF which seeks to diversify the biomedical research workforce. For 17 years, Dr. Baird mentored over 75 students in his lab where they studied protein structure-function relationships using the serine protease trypsin as a model system. In 2021, he became an American Society for Biochemistry & Molecular Biology inaugural Fellow.

Dr. Candace Thille is the director for workforce and adult learning in the Stanford Accelerator for Learning and an associate professor in the graduate school of education and interdepartmental faculty in neuroscience at Stanford University.

In January 2018, Dr. Thille left the academy and Joined Amazon to create and lead a new organization, Learning Science and Engineering. As the Director of Learning Science, she led the company’s global organization to build the technical infrastructure and work processes to innovate and scale workplace learning for Amazon’s 1.6 million employees world-wide. She resigned from Amazon in December 2022 and rejoined the Stanford faculty in February 2023.

Dr. Thille was the founding director of the Open Learning Initiative (OLI) at Carnegie Mellon University and at Stanford University. For the past two decades, in all her roles, her focus has been on applying the results from research in the science of human learning to the design and evaluation of technology mediated learning environments and in using those environments to conduct research at the intersection of human learning and machine learning (AI).

Dr. Thille currently serves on the board of trustees at ETS and on the board of directors for the California Learning Lab in the California Governor’s Office. She has served on the board of directors of the Association of American Colleges and Universities; as a fellow of the International Society for Design and Development in Education; on the Assessment 2020 Task Force of the American Board of Internal Medicine; on the advisory council for the Association of American Universities STEM initiative; and on the advisory council for the National Science Foundation Directorate for Education and Human Resources. She served on the working group of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) that produced the Engage to Excel report and on the U.S. Department of Education working groups, co-authoring the 2010 and 2015 National Education Technology Plans.

Dr. Thille holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley, a master’s degree from Carnegie Mellon University, and a doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania.

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