By Julia Schwarz
Kevin Alarcón Negy has joined Princeton as a teaching faculty member in computer science, bringing expertise in systems. He started July 1, 2025.
Negy has enjoyed teaching for as long as he can remember. “Every time I had a chance to teach or present in school, I always enjoyed it more than anything else,” he said. His first job, after completing a bachelor’s degree in political science and Spanish at the University of Central Florida, was teaching English to high school students in Spain.
While he had always been interested in computers, it wasn’t until he returned from Spain that he started taking programming classes. Trying to figure out his next career move, he took a free online course on the programming language Python. “One thing led to another, and I was back in undergrad computer science courses,” Negy said. Eventually he re-enrolled at the University of Central Florida and did a second undergraduate degree in computer science.
Negy was drawn to computer programming because it gave him tools to build things. “In political science, you’re a bystander observing events,” he said. “In computer science, you’re the one creating the programs. You’re the one that gets to decide how you want to design things and solve actual problems.”
He went on to get a doctorate in computer science at Cornell University, where his research interests were wide-ranging. Ultimately, he focused on operating systems and cloud computing. Operating systems are the lowest-level of software, Negy said, the layer that communicates with the hardware. “I just wanted to know how computers actually worked,” he said. “I wanted to go as deep as possible.”
This semester, Negy is teaching COS 417: Operating Systems, with Mae Milano. In the Fall, he will be co-teaching COS 217: Introduction to Programming Systems with Christoper Moretti and J.P. Singh. He is also advising a couple of independent work projects, one on decentralized networking and one on data replication in cloud services.
At Princeton, Negy is looking forward to advising more students on their independent work projects and continuing to teach classes on programming and operating systems. “I really enjoy it when I see students get excited about the latest precept and they’re asking questions, bringing up great ideas, or trying to solve a problem with me,” he said. “It’s a really rewarding back-and-forth.”