Brown CS News

Brown CS faculty member Don Stanford has just delivered his last lecture for the department after more than two decades in the classroom. Some members of our community have known him for a half-century (he earned an MS in Computer Science, Computational and Applied Mathematics from Brown in 1977 after a BA in International Relations in 1972), and few of them will be surprised that Don’s energy and ability to engage with his audience are as strong as ever. 

“No matter the topic, make sure your material is relevant to students,” Don enthuses when asked to share his teaching expertise with new faculty. “When I began with CS 2 [now CSCI 0020] The Digital World in 2002, I rewrote as much as I could to serve the many students who had never sent an email or opened a web browser. Always ask them: why do you want to know this, how are you going to apply it? Be open, and talk to students about whatever’s on their mind, whether it’s CS or not. I had a student who went from being a chemistry major to a CS major, then served as my Head TA for two years, and now she’s a Senior Engineer at Microsoft. CS 2 is much more advanced than it was twenty years ago, but that’s because today’s students come to us a lot more prepared. The best thing we can do is really relate to them and show them why we take a certain approach, why it’s relevant and how we can use it in the real world.”

Don remembers arriving on campus as an undergraduate in 1968 at a moment when all of Brown’s new architecture was Brutalist and most of its older architecture, he says, looked worn. 

“Now,” he notes, “everything has been rebuilt from the inside out. Rather than tear down, Brown has preserved our history but renovated and modernized from within. I was on the Advisory Committee for President Ruth Simmons, who really got the ball rolling in that regard, so I got to see that process from the inside out. There’s a huge visual and functional difference: we’ve done really well there.” 

Brown’s stature has soared over the past fifty years, Don says, but the biggest change has been demographic: “When I was an undergrad, men outnumbered women four to one. Now, there are more women than men, and more women’s sports than men’s sports. We have Mosaic+ and Women in Computer Science (WiCS) – I remember when WiCS had ten members! Women proliferate in Engineering and Computer Science now, and that’s the best change that I could have seen. It makes a huge difference, something we can’t even measure.”

After graduating with his MS from Brown, Don began working for GTECH (now IGT Global Solutions), a leading manufacturer of lottery, digital, and sports betting equipment and platforms, as their original Manager of Software and Systems Development in 1978. In the years that followed, he held every technical leadership position in the organization, including Vice President of Advanced Development and Chief Technology Officer, and helped guide GTECH’s growth from a software staff of four to more than 1,200 technology professionals. Under Don’s leadership, GTECH advanced the state of the art in transaction processing, retail systems, and wireless communications in the government-regulated gaming industry, helping it rise to over 70% worldwide market share.

“And then, after more than twenty years in industry, I want to say how fortunate I was to be drawn back into the Brown CS community as adjunct professor of the practice,” says Don. “I tell everyone in my friend group: make teaching your retirement gig, because you have a lot to share with students, decades of experience that you can make relevant, but you also have a lot to learn. It’s an important opportunity that people in industry should take advantage of.”

His first engagement with academia wasn’t for the faint of heart: more than three hundred students enrolled in Don’s first semester of CSCI 0020, and he’s taught more than four thousand Brown and RISD undergraduates in the twenty-two years since.

After six years of a retirement sabbatical, Don was persuaded in 2008 to return to GTECH for another ten years as Acting CTO and then as Chief Innovation Officer. He finally retired for good at the end of 2018, capping a forty-year relationship with the company. However, he continued to teach CSCI 0020 in parallel while fulfilling his GTECH leadership duties.

“I’ve watched Brown CS experience near-exponential growth over the past fifty years,” Don says. “When I was a student, CS was a nerdy concentration inside of Applied Math, and now we’re the number one concentration at Brown.  Who could have predicted that?”

He credits his family as one of the major factors that propelled his mid-career move to academia. “I initially retired relatively early,” he says, “because after being on the road so much, I wanted to spend more time at home, and that’s why I was able to start teaching.” 

Don breaks out in a smile as he talks about fifty years of marriage with his wife, Jane, and the time he spends with his daughter Amanda’s four sons, each of whom has special interests, including rocket science, that he tries to encourage. His pride in his whole family is evident, and particularly in his younger daughter, Julia, who swam in the Special Olympics for more than eighteen years, earning dozens of medals.

“And she goes out in the community every day and gives something back,” Don says. “My family has been everything for me, and I wouldn’t trade that for the world.” 

Throughout his career in both industry and academia, Don’s devotion to serving the community and our field has been a constant. He was a member of the Rhode Island Science and Technology Advisory Council; a founding member of Times Squared STEM Academy, Rhode Island’s second charter school; and a Board member and mentor at Year Up, a nonprofit which helps students improve their job prospects and career mobility. 

His accolades have been equally impressive. Don is the recipient of the Black Engineer of the Year Award for Professional Achievement, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)’s Honorable Thurgood Marshall Award for Community Service, the Brown University Graduate School’s Distinguished Alumni Award (later renamed the Horace Mann Medal), and the Rhode Island Professional Engineer’s Award for Community Service.

Being a mentor has been a focus of Don’s service, including multiple collaborations with students at Brown’s Nelson Center for Entrepreneurship, where he was honored with the Hazeltine Award for Entrepreneurial Mentorship. He thinks mentoring is more relevant than ever for Brown CS in light of the Undergraduate Teaching Assistant program’s rising costs: “Many students have already mentored other students in high school. I’d love to see that continue at Brown CS with a mentoring collective that has large numbers of juniors and seniors donating an hour or two of their time per week to mentor first-year and second-year students for their own personal development, as community service. Mentoring isn’t for everybody, but you can learn a lot from it about being persuasive or helping people learn new concepts and develop their strengths. Companies really value people who can help other employees grow and excel.”

Although he’s delivered his last CSCI 0020 lecture, Don will continue to teach at the School of Professional Studies this spring and summer. He’s taught all eight cohorts of their Technology Leadership Master’s degree program to date, and he’s currently designing a new course on ethics in technology for the program, which is changing its format and moving completely online to serve full-time professionals who may have families of their own.  

Even if he won’t see them in person, Don is excited about the prospect of stepping in front of yet another new generation of students. His advice for them is clearly drawn from a life motivated by curiosity and propelled by experimentation: “To learn something new and challenging, you don’t necessarily have to do it in a class. As a kid, I was a reader, and I taught myself to be pretty proficient with ham radio and electronics just from trial and error. If you’re interested in something, self-educational materials have never been more plentiful than they are at this moment in history. Choose your classes wisely, but don’t hesitate to self-educate: you may have ideas about what you’re interested in, but come to campus with an open mind and absorb all of the goodness and the resources that Brown offers. There’s no lack of people that you’ll find affinity with to do something interesting, and it may even become part of your resume.”

“I’m ever true to Brown for everything that it’s given me,” Don says, “and I’m fortunate and honored to have had the opportunity to give something back. I was lucky that my hobby and my passion became my career, and yours may, too.  You never know!”

For more information, click the link that follows to contact Brown CS Communication Outreach Specialist Jesse C. Polhemus.