Ismael Villegas Molina

Hello! My name is Ismael, and I’m currently a 5th year Ph.D. candidate at UC San Diego in computer science. I got my M.S. in computer science at USC’s Viterbi School of Engineering. I got my B.S. at Columbia University’s Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science (that’s quite the mouthful) for computer science as well. For those that are interested, I went to high school in El Centro, CA and graduated from the GREAT Central Union High School (Go Spartans!).

The overall motivator for my work is for broadening participation in CS, particularly for people from my background of U.S. Latines (Latines refers to people whose origin are from Latin America. You may have heard the term “Latinx” which has its own background and you can see the difference here). In the effort to broaden the participation in the field, lots of different avenues have presented themselves for exploration! Currently, I’m focused on the effects of culturally-relevant computing and socially responsible computing practices and seeing its effect on ALL students (with a focus on trying to better the experience from marginalized students in computing). A lot of the work I do in this field is advised by Gerald Soosai Raj. This work has recently gotten the Chair’s Award for Best Student Paper at CompEd 2025 which also included my other two advisors Leo Porter and Bill Griswold! I’ve also been working towards evaluating (and soon-to-be creating/finetuning) AI models to be more culturally diverse and socially aware (a lot of this work done with Leo and Gerald). I know that there is this big AI craze, but I feel that we should also take a step back and really evaluate what kind of outputs we get and if they are too narrow in scope of what they could be.

I also LOVE teaching! It’s one of my favorite things to do. Seeing a student really “get it” and feel like a whole new programmer after-the-fact is immensely rewarding! I’ve been lucky to have been an instructor of record for the intro programming course at UCSD. You can check out my course website which includes many aspects of the course including lecture slides and the syllabus. If you would actually like to see how it all went down, I uploaded all the lecture recordings on YouTube for you to check out! I will say that the room I was recording in did have some camera issues several times, so there are a span of lectures with no visuals (which is a shame because I love using the board or physical objects to make connections).

Outside of any work, my free time is mainly being with my wife and our 1-year-old baby! Those two are my WORLD! I also take time to go to the movie theater as much as I can (check out my Letterboxd for movie reviews), make short films, and also play music whenever I have the time (mainly trombone and piano).

In the 2025-2026 academic year, I am on the job market searching for various academic positions including (but not limited to) teaching-track, research-track, and post-doc opportunities.