Deaths on June 11

Susan B. Horwitz, American computer scientist, engineer, and academic (b. 1955)

Susan Beth Horwitz (January 6, 1955 – June 11, 2014) was an American computer scientist noted for her research on

programming languages and software engineering, and in particular on program slicing and

dataflow-analysis. She had several best paper and an impact paper award mentioned below under awards.

She was an award-winning teacher at her institution and was the founder of Peer Led Team Learning for Computer Science (PLTLCS), creating the Wisconsin Emerging Scholars-Computer Science (WES-CS) program. She took the lead for an NSF ITWF Grant 0420343 that was a collaboration between eight schools doing PLTLCS, including the University of Wisconsin–Madison with Horwitz, Duke University, Georgia Tech, Rutgers University, University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, Purdue University, Beloit College, and Loyola College. They published a paper in 2009 that showed that active recruiting combined with peer-led team learning is an effective approach to attracting and retaining under-represented students in an introductory Computer Science class. She was also noted for her leadership in computing in high schools. She was a member of the Educational Testing Services Advanced Placement Computer Science Test Development Committee for ten years from 1987 to 1997, including chairing the committee for five years from 1992 to 1997 at a time when the programming language for the exam changed from Pascal to C++.