Tammy VanDeGrift

Shiley School of Engineering, Associate Dean, Professor

Tammy VanDeGrift

Email:

Phone:
503.943.7256

Address:
Shiley Hall 226

Title IX Responsible Employee

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About

Tammy VanDeGrift is the Vassallo Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at the University of Portland's Donald P. Shiley School of Engineering. She holds a B.A. in Computer Science and Mathematics from Gustavus Adolphus College and both her M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Washington.

Dr. VanDeGrift joined the faculty at UP in 2005. She currently serves as Program Chair of Computer Science, Associate Dean, and as faculty advisor for the Society of Women Engineers student chapter. Her teaching spans a wide range of computer science courses, including data structures and computer science theory, with a particular focus on making the discipline accessible and engaging for all students.

Her research is focused on computer science education — studying how people learn to program, how to design effective and inclusive courses, and how to support students from diverse backgrounds. She has published extensively in the Association for Computing Machinery SIGCSE Technical Symposium, Consortium for Computing Sciences in Colleges, and American Society for Engineering Education venues, and is a recipient of the ASEE Best Paper Award.

Tammy has one of the most extensive service records in the Shiley School. At UP, she has served on the Academic Senate, the Core Curriculum Committee, the Committee on Rank and Tenure, and numerous search and strategic planning committees, and has been a dedicated new faculty mentor to multiple colleagues across engineering and beyond. Within the Shiley School, she has been faculty advisor for the Society of Women Engineers student chapter since 2011 and has represented the school at countless outreach events. Professionally, she is UP's representative to AccessComputing, a long-standing reviewer for ACM SIGCSE, ICER, and the Journal of Engineering Education, and served for a decade as Associate Editor for the ACM Transactions on Computing Education.

Education

  • Ph.D., University of Washington (Seattle, Washington)
  • M.S., University of Washington (Seattle, Washington)
  • B.A., Gustavus Adolphus College (St. Peter, Minnesota)

Links

Selected Recent Publications

  1. Tammy VanDeGrift, Mihaela Sabin, Amruth N. Kumar, Bonnie K. MacKellar, Renée McCauley and Stephanos Matsumoto. An Experience Report: What Students Say Could be Done to Promote Dispositions. In Proceedings of the 31st ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education, July 2026, pages 422 – 428.
  2. Amruth N. Kumar, Renée McCauley, Bonnie K. MacKellar, and Tammy VanDeGrift. A Three-GenAI Consensus Model for Deductive Analysis of Response Data. In Proceedings of Educational Data Mining, June 2026, pages 408 – 414.
  3. Tammy VanDeGrift. Putting “Active” into Learning Theory of Computation. Journal of Computing Sciences in Colleges, vol 41, no 9, 2026, pages 29-47.
  4. Renée McCauley, Mihaela Sabin, Bonnie K. MacKellar, Tammy VanDeGrift, Stephanos Matsumoto, and Amruth N. Kumar. The Collaborative Disposition: What Students Say. In Proceedings of the IEEE Frontiers of Education Conference, November 2025.
  5. Mihaela Sabin, Amruth N. Kumar, Bonnie K. MacKellar, Renée McCauley, Tammy VanDeGrift, and Stephanos Matsumoto. The Self-Directed Disposition: What Computing Students Say. In Proceedings of the 30th ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education, June 2025, pages 107 – 113.