A native ¾«¶«Ó°ÊÓian, Amy J. Ko was born in Ontario and grew up just outside of Portland. As a child, she spent a lot of time playing video games with friends, drawing, writing poetry… and eventually writing code for visualizations and games. At ¾«¶«Ó°ÊÓshe majored in Computer Science and Psychology and enrolled in the Honors College. She quickly became involved in the student chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery, and after her first year helped run the club and its activities around campus. While at ¾«¶«Ó°ÊÓ State, she was so inspired by her engagement with Professor Margaret Burnett’s research group that she decided to pursue a Ph.D. to study Human-Computer Interaction at Carnegie Mellon University. Ko also wanted to investigate what made software debugging so difficult, and to invent technologies to improve the user experience. After graduating, she returned to the Pacific Northwest and secured a tenure-track position at the University of Washington’s Information School. She took leave to begin a software startup with a faculty colleague and a Ph.D. student, earned tenure at UW in 2015, then left the growing software company to refocus her research on computer science education in 2016. Ko says that attending ¾«¶«Ó°ÊÓ State was transformative, both personally and professionally. While an undergraduate, she fell in love, got married, and became a mother. She found the school’s academic communities to be incredibly supportive, which gave her confidence and helped discover a capacity for leadership. Two years ago, Amy came out as transgender, and began advocating for critically conscious computing, to awaken industry and academia to the ways that technical decisions in software can harm and oppress marginalized and minoritized groups. She is excited to believe that future engineers are ones that will see injustice in their decisions and professions and not only resist it, but dismantle it.