Joan Francioni - Editor of the Expanding the Pipeline column Department of Computer Science Winona State University Joan is currently a Full Professor of Computer Science at Winona State University, a state university in southeastern Minnesota. She began teaching in 1983, two years after receiving the first Computer Science Ph.D. degree awarded by Florida State University. Although teaching has always been her main interest in academics, she served as the Department Head at the University of Louisiana in Lafayette for five years and has enjoyed doing research throughout her career as well. One of the very exciting parts about her work these days is a research project that combines teaching with the study of a particular computer-human interface. Specifically, she is working on an NSF-sponsored project to figure out effective ways to teach computer science to students who are blind or have severe visual disabilities. As part of this project, Joan and Ann Smith, the Co-PI of the grant, are developing an assistive software tool for learning to program, called JavaSpeak. Basically, JavaSpeak is an editor with aural feedback designed to provide a user with useful information about a program’s structure and semantics. It is designed to parse the program and "speak" the program’s structure to a blind user, much in the same way that separate lines and indentation and color help "show" the structure of the program to a sighted user. A prototype of the tool has already been built, and tests with blind programmers will begin as early as the summer of 2000. Outside of work, Joan enjoys as much time as she can outdoors. It's been a little tricky in the winter in Minnesota for her (Joan is originally from New Orleans, Louisiana) but with the help of snowshoes and cross-country skis, she's adapting. During the summer, she and her partner spend lots of time gardening and bicycling. In the summer of 1999, they did a cross-country bike trip with the American Lung Association, which in her words was "a blast and a great adventure." Mary Jean Harrold - Distributed Mentoring Project College of Computing Georgia Institute of Technology Mary Jean Harrold received the BS and MA degrees in mathematics from Marshall University and the MS and PhD degrees in computer science from the University of Pittsburgh. She is currently anassociate professor in the College of Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology. Her research interests include the development of efficient techniques and tools that will automate, or partiallyautomate, development, testing, and maintenance tasks. Her research to date has involved program-analysis-based software engineering, with an emphasis on regression testing, analysis and testing of imperative and object-oriented software, and development of software tools. Her recentresearch has focused on the investigation of the scalability issues of these techniques, through algorithm development and empirical evaluation. She is a recipient of the National Science Foundation's National YoungInvestigator Award. Dr. Harrold serves on the editorial board of IEEE Transactions on Software engineering. She is serving as the program chair for the ACM International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis (July 2000) and the program co-chair of the 23rd International Conference on Software Engineering (May 2001). She is a member of the Computing Research Association's Committee on the Status of Women in Computing, and she directs the committee's Distributed Mentor Project. She is a member of the IEEE Computer Society and the ACM.