CSAB Names New Executive Director

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
April 26, 2023

CSAB, Inc., the lead ABET member society for accreditation of computing degree programs, will have a new Executive Director effective this summer. Dr. Andrew Phillips will take over from Liz Glazer, who is retiring after 14 years in the position.

“We’re going to miss Liz very much,” says CSAB’s President, Dr. Mary Jane Willshire-Fairley. “But, we couldn’t have found a better successor than Andy Phillips. As a former CSAB President and long-time ABET volunteer, Andy knows our organization inside out. Most importantly, he understands the critical role CSAB plays in ensuring quality in computing education. He will take great care of us.”

“I’ve had the pleasure of working with Andy in multiple capacities throughout my tenure,” says Glazer. “He is always professional, always positive, and always as willing to do the work. I’m relieved that CSAB will be in such good hands.”

Phillips has been a CSAB program evaluator since 1997 and was a member of the Computing Accreditation Commission of ABET from 2004-2009. He has trained many CSAB volunteers on the Computer Science program criteria and made visit assignments for evaluators across CSAB’s disciplines for many years. As President of CSAB, he led efforts to establish accreditation in cybersecurity, bringing together experts from multiple organizations to establish criteria and recruit pilot programs. Most recently, Phillips has served on the ABET Board of Directors as the Computing Area Director, and as an ABET Delegate for CSAB and Chair of the Computing Area Delegation. A career-long proponent of accreditation, he has also served as an evaluator for the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools and the Middles States Commission on Higher Education.

Phillips will be retiring this summer from his current position as the Academic Dean and Provost of the United States Naval Academy. In that capacity, Phillips is USNA’s senior civilian official and is responsible for leadership and oversight of all academic matters. He is a graduate of the Pennsylvania State University and earned his master’s and Ph.D. in computer science at the University of Minnesota.

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CSAB, Inc., is a federation of the world’s three largest technical, educational, and scientific societies in computing and statistics: The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the American Statistical Association (ASA), and the IEEE-Computer Society (IEEE-CS). Founded as an accreditation board for computing sciences in 1985, CSAB now serves as the lead ABET member society for accreditation of degree programs in computer science, cybersecurity, data science, information systems, information technology, and software engineering. In this capacity, CSAB is responsible for developing the programmatic accreditation criteria, nominating more than 80 commissioners across all four ABET commissions, and managing a pool of nearly 400 computing program evaluators. There are currently more than 675 ABET-accredited computing programs spanning nearly 25 countries.