Joslenne Peña | Minneapolis College of Art and Design

Joslenne Peña

Faculty

Title
Instructor
Education
MS, Penn State's iSchool
BA, University of Hartford

Joslenne (Joss) Peña is a researcher, mentor, and educator. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Informatics at Penn State's iSchool. To gain industry experience, she underwent a fourteen-month internship as a Research Associate in Human-Centered Systems at Honeywell Aerospace in Plymouth, MN. Her dissertation work centers on understanding the impacts and behaviors of a coding workshop and developing a new metric to assess the different entry points of individuals revisiting computing education after a long hiatus.

Peña has a varied teaching background mostly in web development, game design, human-computer interaction, web scraping using Python, and research design methods. She currently teaches Code For Her, which is a web development workshop series for women and gender-diverse individuals at University Park. She has previously taught coding for the national iD Tech Camps and Penn State's iTech Academy for middle school and high school students. Additionally, she has experience as a graduate teaching assistant and lecturer in several undergraduate courses at Penn State. Lastly, she has co-taught research and programming modules for budding underrepresented undergraduate researchers at the University of Pittsburgh.

Being a first-generation Hispanic woman pursuing her advanced degree in a computing field, Peña prides herself in prioritizing inclusion and diversity. She has gone to diversity conferences and aided in developing initiatives that give underrepresented students a voice and a chance. In her free time, Peña likes to build LEGO models, watch Netflix, drink coffee, lurk on reddit and twitter, and relax with her cat Nelson.