Rose-Hulman Emeritus Professor Honored

Cary Laxer

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Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology Emeritus Professor and former head of the Computer Science and Software Engineering Department Cary Laxer will be recognized by his international peers for his lifetime of service to computer science education. He will be honored in March at the ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, the Association of Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group in Computer Science Education’s virtual conference.

For the past 25 years, Laxer has played a key role in the SIGCSE conference as a volunteer who has helped oversee the annual event’s registration procedures. His service on the committee will end with this year’s conference. He also has attended nearly every SIGCSE conference since the late 1980s and made several technical presentations throughout the years with students, department faculty colleagues, and scholars from throughout the world.

Laxer helped pave the way for enormous change within computer science education – at Rose-Hulman and across the country. Under his leadership as department chair from 2002-15, CSSE grew in student enrollment and faculty stature, moved into renovated office and laboratory spaces in the campus’s largest academic building, Moench Hall, and added an emphasis in software engineering. The department also added an academic major in international computer science. This is a dual degree program with Germany’s Ulm University of Applied Sciences/Technische Hochschule Ulm.

He also helped enhance computer science programs at other colleges and universities as a computer science program evaluator for the ABET accreditation organization. He also served as a computer science education consultant.

Laxer joined the Rose-Hulman faculty in 1981 after earning his doctorate from Duke University in 1980 and a bachelor’s degree from New York University in 1976. He retired from full-time teaching in 2017 and remained as a part-time instructor until 2019. During his faculty tenure, Laxer earned the Dean’s Outstanding Teacher Award in 1986 and was given honorary alumni status by the Rose-Hulman Alumni Association in 2002.