Faculty Director of Data Science Undergraduate Studies (DSUS) and Associate Teaching Professor in the UC Berkeley EECS department

Email: ude.yelekreb@orened

Where and When

Spring 2025 Lecture Schedule

• CS 61A 2pm-3pm Monday, Wednesday, and Friday in 150 Wheeler

Spring 2025 Office Hours

• 3:15pm-4pm Monday and Wednesday in 781 Soda Hall
• By appointment

What and How

Research

• Publications (although Google Scholar is often more up-to-date)
• Berkeley students are welcome to email me with questions about research. Currently I am not taking new students.

Teaching

• Past and Current Courses
• YouTube channel
• Composing Programs, a free online textbook for introductory computer science
• Computational and Inferential Thinking: The Foundations of Data Science, a free online textbook for introductory data science
• The Pac-Man projects for teaching artificial intelligence
• Instructor materials and info for Data 8
• Data Science Education at Berkeley

News and Awards

2018

• Distinguished Teaching Award (UC Berkeley)
• The number of female students awarded EECS or CS degrees from Cal quadrupled and the proportion doubled since 2010. (San Jose Mercury News)
• Over 50,000 people enrolled in the first course of the online Data 8X course series. (UC Berkeley News)
• Voted Best Faculty Member (The Daily Californian)

2017

• Appointed the inaugural Giancarlo Teaching Fellow (College of Engineering, Berkeley)
• Jim and Donna Gray Faculty Award for Undergraduate Teaching (EECS department, Berkeley)
• A UC Berkeley team was sponsored for the Alexa Prize. (Amazon)
• Microsoft Research Blog highlights the Berkeley Data Science Education Program. (Microsoft)
• What Is a Data Scientist, Anyway? an article describes the structure and goals of Berkeley's data science education program. (Wall Street Journal)
• CS 61A has record enrollment of 1760 enrolled + 150 waitlisted in Fall 2017. (The Daily Californian)

2016

• Diane McEntyre Award for Excellence in Teaching (CS Division, Berkeley)
• Voted Best Faculty Member (The Daily Californian)
• Data 8 featured in the Chancellor's Corner (The Daily Californian)
• Honorable Mention Award for Excellence in Promoting Women in Undergraduate Computing (NCWIT)
• Award for data science platform development (Google)

2015

• Outstanding Faculty of the Year Award (Tau Beta Pi, Berkeley)
• CS 61A listed among Five of the Best Computer Science Classes in the U.S. (Bloomberg)
• Computer science capacity award (Google)

Bio

John DeNero is the Giancarlo Teaching Fellow in the UC Berkeley EECS department. He joined the Cal faculty in 2014 to focus on undergraduate education in computer science and data science. He teaches and co-develops two of the largest courses on campus: introductory computer science for majors (3000 students per year) and introductory data science (1500 students per year). He is the author of Composing Programs and co-author of Computational and Inferential Thinking, two online textbooks. His research focuses both on natural language processing and computer science education. He received his Masters in Philosophy from Stanford University and his PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from UC Berkeley in 2010. Prior to becoming a professor, John was a senior research scientist at Google working primarily on Google Translate and natural language processing.

Teaching reviews: HKN, Ninja Courses, Rate My Professors.