Evan McCarty

OSF Lab Project Lead
Lecturer, Computer Science

Evan is a teaching faculty member in the UIC Department of Computer Science. He has taught large undergraduate courses in both theory and software design and has been successful in scaling course sizes. While teaching at the University of Washington, Evan was impressed by the well-trained and motivated undergraduate Teaching Assistants (TAs). When he joined UIC in 2018, he began implementing similar programs, including the creation of a mandatory one-credit TA training course for new TAs. He is also responsible for the overall management and semester-to-semester assignment of more than 150 undergraduate TAs.

In addition to his teaching role, Evan works at the UIC Innovation Center as part of a research team made up of students, alumni, and faculty that collaborates with corporate partners to address company-specific challenges. In the OSF HealthCare/UIC-sponsored project, he worked with other researchers to guide the development of the Card Sort tool—a digital platform that supports meaningful conversations with patients about their social determinants of health in a format that is easy to analyze.

Evan also serves as a mentor in the Sprinternship program, an initiative through Break Through Tech that offers intensive, three-week internships for female and non-binary computer science students at corporations and UIC units. Through the Innovation Center’s participation, he mentored Sprinterns on a project for Grainger and will do so again for OSF HealthCare in summer 2024. In just three weeks, four undergraduate students developed a prototype for a new Grainger app aimed at making the management and maintenance of the company’s corporate vending machines more efficient and effective.

This semester, Evan is leading a Tech-in-Residence course with ten undergraduates focused on producing simple, research-driven solutions to common challenges faced by customer support teams.