By Julia Schwarz
Maryam Hedayati has joined Princeton as a teaching faculty member in computer science, bringing expertise in human-computer interaction. She started August 1, 2025.
Hedayati never had plans to study computer science. She entered Carleton College as an undergraduate without any background in programming, she said, and ended up in a computer science class because she registered late and it was one of the few classes that still had space.
“I just fell in love with it,” she said. The faculty and the teaching assistants were welcoming and encouraging. “They made me feel like computer science was something I could do,” she said, “and they also made me feel like it was okay to struggle.”
Now she wants to pass on that experience to her own students. Encountering computer science for the first time can be difficult, she said, particularly because you get feedback right away — either the program you’re writing works or it doesn’t. “Students are learning how to think in this new way, and I really enjoy helping them through that.”
After graduating from Carleton, Hedayati went on to complete a doctorate at Northwestern University in computer science and learning science. It’s an unusual program, she said, run jointly by the School of Engineering and the School of Education and Social Policy.
While at Northwestern, she advocated to get more teaching experience, creating a new teaching mentorship program for doctoral students. The program allowed her to serve as a teaching assistant, give guest lectures, and meet regularly with course instructors to get feedback on pedagogy.
She also did research in human-computer interaction and wrote a dissertation on data visualization literacy. “I looked at how people make sense of unfamiliar visualizations,” she said. She found that with training, students tend to try and make sense of an unfamiliar graph by focusing on one piece of it. Insights from her work can help inform visualization designers who are trying to convey complex data to non-specialist audiences, she said.
This semester, Hedayati is co-teaching COS 226: “Algorithms and Data Structures” alongside faculty members Gillat Kol and Pedro Paredes. She’s looking forward to teaching more introductory courses and advising student research projects.
“Advising is one of my favorite parts of the job,” she said. She really enjoys Princeton’s emphasis on senior theses and independent work. “There are all of these ways that students get to build one-on-one relationships with faculty.”