Dan Garcia is a Lecturer SOE in the Computer Science Division of the
EECS Department at the University of California, Berkeley, and joined
the Cal faculty in the fall of 2000. He has won the departmental Diane
S. McEntyre Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2002, the departmental
Information Technology Faculty Award for Excellence in Undergraduate
Teaching in 2004, and was chosen as a UC Berkeley "Unsung Hero" in
2005. He recently earned the highest teaching effectiveness ratings in
the history of the department's lower-division introductory courses
(tied with one other at 6.7 / 7).  He has taught (or co-taught as a
graduate student instructor, where he won both departmental and campus
outstanding GSI awards) courses in teaching techniques, computer
graphics, virtual reality, computer animation, self-paced programming
as well as the lower-division introductory curriculum. He is active in
SIGCSE, and serves on the ACM Education Board as well as BFOIT, a
wonderful Berkeley outreach effort.

He is currently mentoring over seventy undergraduates spread across
four groups he founded in 2001 centered around his research, art and
development interests in computer graphics, Macintosh OS X
programming, computational game theory and computer science
education. He also recently co-developed a computing course for all
freshman engineers.  Dan received his PhD and MS in Computer Science
from UC Berkeley in 2000 and 1995, and dual BS degrees in Computer
Science and Electrical Engineering from Massachusetts Institute of
Technology in 1990.

On the fun side, he can dance DDR level 7, play the harmonica, juggle
5 balls, score in the low 90s on the links, spin things on his finger
and knows all the words to many old-school raps, stand-up comedy bits
and Monty Python sketches. He also has a collection of several hundred
game and puzzle books, and terribly enjoys sharing good brain teasers
or playing any one of his many exotic board games with students who
drop by during open office hours.

His wife Tao is also a UC Berkeley Computer Science alumni, and is
finishing up her PhD at the University of Melbourne in the CUBIN
centre. They have a 2-year-old son Yuan (pronounced like U.N.).