Kathleen McKeown Speaks the Language of Mentorship

Over the course of her 40-year career at Columbia Engineering, Kathleen McKeown has experienced many firsts. She was the first woman granted tenure at the Engineering School, the first woman to chair the Department of Computer Science, and the founding director of the Data Science Institute. Though McKeown, who is the Henry and Gertrude Rothschild Professor of Computer Science, is best known as a pioneer in the area of natural language processing, she has also devoted much time over the years to mentoring students and junior colleagues in the field. 

This year, Columbia is celebrating her dedication to inspiring and supporting the next generation with the Faculty Mentoring Award, which will be presented to McKeown at the May 21 University Commencement. 

One of McKeown’s most remarkable contributions to mentoring has been her dedicated support for junior faculty. She has formally mentored more than 10 computer science faculty members, including the department’s two current junior women, offering invaluable guidance on research, professional development, and navigating the complexities of academia. Informally, her mentorship has reached even further—she is a trusted source of advice, encouragement, and support for countless junior colleagues, many of whom are now senior faculty across three other schools at Columbia.

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Championing the next generation of faculty

Outside of the department, McKeown partnered with Desmond Patton, then at the Columbia School of Social Work, on several projects examining the interplay between computer science and societal issues. When Patton arrived at Columbia in 2015, McKeown was one of the first computer science faculty members who responded to his outreach for research collaboration. She recalls being immediately enthusiastic about Patton’s work and knew right away that she wanted to collaborate. Their first meeting sparked a strong connection, leading to a research partnership focused on exploring the Black experience, an area rarely addressed in computer science. Patton credits this transdisciplinary collaboration with McKeown as a key factor in his eventual tenure at the university.

“I have to say, coming to a new school and being a person of color that is trying to get into the computer science and engineering spaces was very scary,” said Patton, who is now the Brian and Randi Schwartz University Professor at the University of Pennsylvania. “It was easy to connect with Kathy and to learn from her. She has been such a mentor for me in this space and, I think, the model for how senior faculty should connect with a junior faculty member.”

McKeown’s impact extends beyond Columbia. She has actively supported the careers of emerging scholars nationwide, including advocating for fellowships and award nominations. Notably, many of those she supported went on to win prestigious awards, including Regina Barzilay at MIT, Mohit Bansal at University of Chapel Hill, Yejin Choi at University of Washington, and Dan Roth at University of Pennsylvania. Her influence has included close relationships and collaborations, one of whom–Heng Ji at University of Illinois–recently sent her a special Mother's Day message: "Happy Mother's Day, Kathy! Thank you for adopting me into your academic family!"

With 40 PhD students mentored, 11 of whom are faculty who went on to institutions such as Yale, MIT, and others, McKeown’s influence on the next generation of scholars is both wide-reaching and deeply felt. Not only has she mentored her students, but she has advocated for them, as well. 

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A Legacy of student mentorship

In 2006, Noemie Elhadad, was in the final year of her PhD working with McKeown when she became pregnant. At the time, there were concerns that she would not be able to finish her thesis and that she should take the semester off. She remembers how McKeown believed that she could do the work. Elhadad graduated on time and is now chair and associate professor of biomedical informatics in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Columbia. More than a decade later, Elhadad says she still uses what she learned from McKeown in her own research and at times thinks, “What would Kathy do?”

McKeown’s mentorship has had a lasting impact at every level, including among undergraduates. Serina Chang CC‘19, joined one such project, contributing to a study accepted at the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP). The team developed machine learning methods that captured both linguistic context—how words are used—and social context, including users’ Twitter networks and the emotional tone of “tweets” or social media posts. Knowing it was Chang’s first oral conference presentation, McKeown spent weeks helping her refine her slides and prepare. Inspired by the experience, Chang pursued a PhD at Stanford and will soon begin as an assistant professor at UC Berkeley and continue her work at the intersection of computation and society.

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In recognition of her exceptional mentorship and teaching, McKeown’s students honored her with the Columbia Great Teacher Award in 2010. Out of the numerous awards and accolades she has won, this is the “most personal” for the computer scientist. That same year, she also won the Anita Borg Woman of Vision Award for Innovation. In 2019, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

To this day, she continues to champion women pursuing excellence in computer science. 

“She is an amazing mentor, and it is hard to overstate that she is a seminal researcher in the field,” said Elhadad. “It is very impressive how good she is at her research, and she is so humble that she will not say it, so I am going to say it for her!”

Lead Photo Caption: Kathleen McKeown, Henry and Gertrude Rothschild Professor of Computer Science