Emma Brunskill, assistant professor of computer science, is the recipient of the National Science Foundation’s Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award, the agency’s most prestigious award for junior faculty.

The five-year, $670,000 award will support her research on data-driven, machine learning algorithms for automatically constructing personalized strategies. Brunskill will use these methods to help create self-improving tutoring systems that provide individualized learning experiences, focusing on mathematics education.

Brunskill, who joined the faculty of the Computer Science Department in 2011, received a 2012 Microsoft Research Faculty Fellowship, which recognizes pioneering young academic computer scientists. She was selected as a 2012-2013 Wimmer Faculty Fellow by the Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence at Carnegie Mellon.

Her research has been recognized with best paper nominations from the Educational Data Mining (EDM) and Computer Human Interaction (CHI) conferences ,  and her work has received financial support from the Institute for Education Sciences, the National Science Foundation, Google, Yahoo, and the university's Berkman Faculty Development Fund.

Brunskill received a bachelor's degree in computer engineering and physics at the University of Washington and, as a Rhodes Scholar, was awarded a master's degree in neuroscience at Oxford University. She earned a Ph.D. in computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was a NSF Mathematical Sciences postdoctoral research fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, before coming to Carnegie Mellon.